Webjet vs Klook for hotels Bookings

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.

Klook

Klook is a major player in the Attraction Tickets space across Asia, although they’re not widely known outside of the region. In recent years they’ve started a hotel booking feature as well, with great success. We’ve gone and checked out their hotel offering and were quite impressed overall. Read on to find our why you might want to consider using Klook for your next hotel booking.

It offers all the basic sorting and filtering functionality which you have come to expect, and searching seems to work well. As with most other OTAs, the majority of the rooms support free cancellation but there are also some that don’t, which are typically cheaper. There’s also some hotels which don’t support free cancellation at all but this is typically the policy of the hotel itself and not Klook.

As with most sites, the map functionality is a bit hit and miss. In terms of the maps for individual hotels it provides the location of a lot of surrounding attractions and has them clearly labelled, however for the transportation section, when checking the hotels in Manhattan it kept recommending me various helipads around the city rather than the airports which is probably what visitors want to know.

One thing we really loved is that it provides a really comprehensive breakdown of all the fees which you can expected to pay, including the deposit, any resort fee (if applicable), parking and breakfast charges. There’s also some basic information about the food and beverage offering available within the hotel, not all competitors offer this kind of information.

Klook provides guest reviews of each hotel, however it appears these all come from hotels.com. What we didn’t like it that although the hotel we were looking at apparently has 995 reviews, we could only check 20 of them. In addition, we couldn’t find many reviews which included photos.

Another cool little feature which Klook offers is the ability to refer-a-friend, quite common for newish ecommerce operations. When you invite friends they’ll get a $5USD promo code to start them off and you’ll get a $5 booking credit when they successfully make a booking.

Where Klook seems to be a bit lacking is in the total number of hotels that are available on it’s platform. For example when searching for a certain city, Klook had 113 results, Booking.com had 131, and Trip.com had 155. Having said that our search did return all the popular hotels, the difference with the other platforms being that they returned by hotels which are unknown or alternative types of accommodation. This of course will vary depending on where you’re traveling to but we’re confident that for the majority of trips this won’t make a huge amount of difference.

Not having been around for as long as some of the competitors like Hotels.com, Booking.com or Expedia, it doesn’t offer as many languages as some other choices. However it has a full range of English sites as well as the major Asian languages and the biggest European languages as well. Besides their desktop website, they also have mobile site as well as a mobile app available on both iOS and Android. And even if they don’t support your desired language, they accept payment in a huge range of currencies.

In terms of payment, Klook appears to accept all major credit and debit cards including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB, UnionPay, Discover and Diners. It also accepts Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Alipay and in certain markets in accepts AfterPay as a Buy Now Pay Later option.

While Klook might be new in the hotel space, they’re very successful in terms of selling attraction tickets and are generally highly recommended. Since they are relatively new it’s difficult to say how reliable they are, but we personally wouldn’t hesitate to give them a go.

Klook customer service is a little difficult to find, but if you go to the help page there’s a small floating chat icon bubble that you can click on to launch their chat feature. As usual they try to answer your question first without connecting you to anybody, but once you get the option to talk to somebody we found that we never had to wait longer than 1 minute, and the staff seemed knowledgeable. We couldn’t find any options for phone or email support.

So overall, you’re probably wondering if it’s worth giving Klook a try for your next hotel booking. While I’m personally yet to try them, based on their great reputation for attraction tickets, pleasant user interface and excellent prices I don’t see any reason not to give them a try, in fact I’m going to try very soon. I can’t wait to see what Klook does going forward, as personally I think they have enormous potential if they keep going the way they are.