Flight Centre vs Webjet for hotels Bookings

Flight Centre

Flight Centre is Australia’s largest offline travel agency, with thousands of store across Australia as well as some presence in New Zealand, South Africa, and other minor markets. While their name might suggest that they only offer flights, they are in fact a full service agency, which means flights, hotels, packages tours and much more. As you might have guessed, they’ve also been working on expanding their online presence in recent years, so let’s take a look at what they’re currently offering for hotels.

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From our own research, Flight Centre has an impressive selection of hotels in Australia and New Zealand, as well as places Australians frequent like the Pacific and Indonesia. While their coverage is not too bad in other major world cities, it certainly thins out a little once you get off the beaten track. What we find is a very localized offering, but one that’s still a good option, especially if you’re planning on traveling into the region.

Flight Centre hotels are available on all three of their platforms; their mobile app available on iOS and Android, their desktop website and their mobile website. Unlike most of their competitors the site is only available in English.

When it comes to hotels, Flight Centre only accepts credit and debit cards. While they support Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Diners it’s disappointing they don’t also support PayPal and Poli pay like they do for flights. In additional, they don’t support Apple Pay or Google Pay, although that’s not likely to be a huge issue for most people. Surprisingly, despite the massive popularity of buy-now-pay-later schemes such as AfterPay, they also don’t support it at this time.

Coming soon

One thing that reassures a lot of people about Flight Centre is that they know there are real people working for the company all across Australia. If you log into their website they clearly display a contact number at the top of their website, unlike their competitors who often try to make it difficult in order to reduce volume. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t appear that they offer any kind of online chat or public email addresses on their website.

Coming soon

Webjet

Webjet is an Australian based online travel agency – in fact it’s really the only independently owned Australian travel booking site. This means that a lot of their offerings are targeted specifically towards an Australian and New Zealand audience. While Webjet, as the name suggests, mainly sells flights, they do have a hotels offering as well which is solid, but generally not as strong as the global travel sites.

We found that the search functionality of Webjet is reasonably good for finding hotels within Australia, but not so good for finding hotels overseas. While it supports searching by city, country, state and point of interest, we found that a lot of major overseas attractions weren’t findable, and you can’t search by airport or railway station. It also doesn’t support some of the advanced functionality that other sites do such as searching by a specific address. Webjet offers both prepaid and pay-at-hotel type rooms, with the labeling of the two fairly clear. We didn’t find their map functionality to be particularly helpful with the only thing on the map being the hotel you’ve selected, and no way to see nearby attractions, restaurants etc. They do have satellite view enabled though as well as street view which is a nice touch which lets you see the general surroundings of the hotel before booking. We were a little bit disappointed by the Wi-Fi information for the rooms. While the site mentioned that the Wi-Fi is charged, they didn’t give any indication as to how much it might cost. In addition, the breakfast information isn’t particularly clear – we couldn’t work out which rooms come with breakfast and which don’t. This is a fairly big issue which we’ve never come across before of any other travel site.

Generally speaking, we found that Webjet’s hotels are slightly on the expensive side, but not by much. While Webjet doesn’t charge any kind of booking fee like they do for flights, they do charge a payment fee, which we be dependent on which payment method you use, and will range from 0.26% to 1.15%.

One thing to realize though is that much of Webjet’s success comes from its other business which specializes in wholesale hotel rooms. What this means for that consumer is that they have a great range of rooms, especially across the Asia Pacific region.

Webjet is available as a desktop website, mobile website and a mobile app, as with most other sites. Unlike most other sites however, Webjet is only available in English, so you’re out of luck if you’re not an English-speaker. This really emphasizes the fact that Webjet is only really aimed at audiences in Australia and New Zealand.

Webjet offers a wide range of payment options on their platforms. For credit and debit cards they accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express and JCB. If you’re paying via mobile you’ll have the option to use either Apple Pay or Google Pay which not a lot of competitors offer, especially local ones. You can also choose to pay with PayPal, or pay in four installments through Afterpay. They even have options to pay through American Express Membership Rewards, or HSBC Interest Free. Overall, a very impressive suite of payment options. Not only that, you can also get Webjet gift cards which of course can be used to pay for hotels.

Webjet’s reputation, like that of most online travel agencies, isn’t particularly great. While for the most part your not going to have any problems, internet talk tends to indicate that they can be difficult to deal with when something goes wrong or you need to change or cancel. Make sure you know what you’re booking before you press the book button!

Webjet claims that you’re able to message them through their website or app 24/7, and that they are available by phone during Australian business hours. Where exactly they show their phone number we don’t know, as we weren’t able to find it anywhere. Presumably they only give it away once people have actually made a booking.

If you’re Australian, or looking to travel In Australia, New Zealand, or in the Asia pacific region in general, Webjet is worth checking out. While their website feels a little bit out-fashioned it actually has all the features you might need when booking a hotel. If you’re not travelling within this area we’d give it a miss, as the experience is quite localized for the Australian market.