Booking.com vs Agoda for hotels Bookings

Booking.com

Booking.com is the world’s largest online travel agency, and is owned by Booking Holdings. In terms of market capitalization, it is also the largest in the world. Booking is synonymous with booking hotels all over the world and also owns several other online travel agencies. Booking.com’s size and success along are testament to its overall good experience, relatively good pricing and good reliability. In addition, Booking.com partners with a lot of other small booking sites, so you might already be booking with Booking.com without even knowing it.

Almost all of the hotels on Booking.com offer free cancelation which is particularly important during thesefast moving times. As with all travel sites, make sure that you check the terms before you book but we find they tend to be pretty transparent on Booking.com.

In the past, Booking.com operates only on the “Pay at hotel” method, however recently they’ve also added some rooms which are “Prepay”, whereby you pay online before the stay. Once again this information is fairly transparent so you always know what you’re going to get. In actual fact, even though Booking.com sometimes displays a room as only accepting one type of payment, often when you get to the checkout page you’ll have the option to choose between the two different ones anyway.

One great feature about Booking.com is the ability to book two different rooms in the one transaction, e.g. A nice room for the parents, and a cheaper room for the kids. Most of the other online travel sites do not support this feature.

Booking.com also offers a strong price guarantee, whereby they promise the refund you the price difference if you find a cheaper price on another site. This is interesting as cheaper rooms can indeed often by found on different sites, and by taking advantage of this best price guarantee you can still enjoy the cheaper price while taking advantage of the reputation and reliability of Booking.com. Be aware though that as always, there is some fine print, so remember to check the relevant conditions before relying on this.

As with other sites there’s a good selection of filters and so you can filter only rooms with free cancellation, breakfast included and in a certain area. One area where Booking.com does a particularly good job with is their user reviews. Due to the huge volume of booking they get, they also have a large number of reviews, which means you can assured of getting an honest opinion. Furthermore, presumably due to volume once again, most hotels do a good job at replying to the reviews also.

You can filter by poor reviews also, which is a feature severely lacking on other online travel sites. In addition, you can check the type of room the reviewer stayed in for a review more tailored to your own circumstances. Another interesting feature is that Booking.com allows you to communicate with the hotel directly before you book, so if there’s any information which isn’t covered on Booking.com itself, you can contact the hotel through Booking.com and they’ll reply to you be email.

Their map experience is also pretty good and loads a good number of hotels on the screen at one time, unlike some of the other competitors. Unfortunately at the time of writing it didn’t appear to show the location of all attractions on the map, however it does have an interesting feature where you can search for a specific attraction and it will show you the directions and distance on Google Maps. Booking.com also offers satellite view on thei map, which although some people don’t find very useful, others swear by it to work out exactly where their hotel is sited in relation to other buildings, roads and natural features.

While dependent on hotel, Booking.com also features some images for the specific facilities within the hotel, however they didn’t seem as clear and nicely sorted as some other sites. If you’re reading this while the COVID-19 pandemic is still occurring, there is a section which details the relevant policies and actions being taken by each hotel.

Booking.com definitely has some sharp pricing, but they aren’t neccecarilly the cheapest in the market. If you want to get the cheapest prices you are still recommended to compare the site against a meta search engine to see where you can get the best price. It may also help if you are part of their loyalty program.

Booking.com features over 1.7 properties across the world, making it clearly the leader. This is believed to be made up of 1.3 million hotels and 400,000 rental properties. Booking.com’s coverage is best in Europe, however might not be as good as Asia as some of their competitors. When it comes to North America, their inventory is also quite strong.

Booking.com is very easy to access. It is available in over 50 languages, and can be accessed via their website, mobile website or their mobile app.

Booking.com accepts all major credit cards as well as PayPal. They aren’t known as a company which offers a lot of alternative payment methods, unfortunately if you want to use things like Apple Pay and Google Pay, or other 3rd party payment methods you’re out of luck. They also don’t accept any buy-now-pay-later type payment methods.

Booking.com, although by far the biggest player in the industry, does actually have a reasonable reputation. This is probably due to the fact that they offer free cancellation on most properties which tends to reduce complaints. Overall, their experience is also quite simple and straightforward since they don’t offer flights and other products, which tends to deliver a superior experience.

Booking.com is available by phone or email, however they don’t have any kind of online chat service. You can however contact the property directly through their website and mobile app.

Booking,com is a great solid option which is always worth a check. If you’re going to Europe they are probably one of your best choices. They are often not found on the comparison sites as much, so checking them out directly is always a good choice.

Agoda

With Booking Holdings (parent of Booking.com) as their parent, it should come as no surprise that Agoda delivers a smooth and reliable experience when it comes to booking hotels. Agoda is originally created in Singapore, which means that they are very strong in South-east Asian markets, as well as Asia in general. Whilst they might not be a household name to Americans and Europeans, they are in fact the largest OTA in several Asian countries and have a strong reputation.

Like most of its competitors, Agoda offers both prepaid and pay-at-hotel options when booking. They also have an Agoda Secret Deals program, where you can book hotels at heavily discounted prices, however the name of the hotel won't be revealed until after you book. One way that they differ from some other competitors is that they let you add options like breakfast as you book, rather than asking you to select the conditions when choosing your room. The quality of their hotel reviews is not bad, however there are a significant amount in languages other than English, which won't be particularly helpful if you're not a native English speaker. When we tested their search functionality we got a lot of mixed results. For example at first we didn’t think that it supported searching by state/province, however it turns out they do but the results typically only show up if you search for something else – odd. Like its parent company Booking.com, Agoda offers a best price guarantee where they will refund the difference if you see a cheaper price on another site. As with all these guarantees, make sure you read the fine print carefully as they’ll only match the price when the booking meets certain conditions. We love Agoda’s search results page. There’s lots of images of each hotel on the page, and you can hover your cursor over them to see an enlarged version. This makes it so much easier to compare hotels without having to go into every one individually. If the COVID-19 pandemic has got you worried, Agoda has lots of useful information about what each hotel is doing on in individual level, for example whether or not they provide masks. You can check both Agoda’s own reviews as well as Booking.com’s reviews on the site, and for Agoda’s own reviews you can filter by room type to see more relevant reviews – something that Booking.com doesn’t offer. Unfortunately, Agoda doesn’t include the hotel replies, even for the Booking.com reviews. Agoda also offers video content for some top-selling hotels, and when we say video content what we actually mean is a slideshow of some of the better images, combined with some user reviews. It’s quite nice, although I don’t think it would make me any more likely to book the hotel. They’ve got a cool map feature where you can see the nearby attractions and shops as points on the map, but unfortunately it doesn’t really show enough information to actually be useful. Agoda also offer price alert functionality so you can keep informed if there’s a price drop. This feature is slowly becoming more common across online travel sites, but a lot still aren’t offering it. One thing that we really like about Agoda is that rather than just saying “Breakfast”, they give detailed information about what kind of breakfast is on offer. Similarly they give detailed information about the restaurants available at the hotel. Once thing we hate is on the payment page there’s a “Holding this price for 5 minutes” countdown, which can be extended by pressing the button. These kinds of pressure selling tactics are typically fake and leave a bad taste in user’s mouths.

As with the other major competitors, Agoda do not charge any kind of booking fee or credit card fee for bookings. The only exception is for Pay-at-hotel bookings, where the hotel may charge a credit card fee – the same as other competitors. From our own independent testing, we found Agoda’s pricing to be excellent, rating number 2 overall in our comparisons. While this was a comparison of properties worldwide, it is overall evident that Agoda’s best pricing can be found in Asia. Being associated with Booking.com however also gives them access to some strong pricing in Europe and the Americas.

From our own internal testing, availability on Agoda is excellent. It excels in South-east Asia and Asia in generally due to its own brand, and has strong coverage in Europe and the Americas, probable due to its relationship with Booking.com.

Hotels are Agoda’s main product, so as expected they are available through their iOS and Android mobile apps, their mobile website and their desktop website. Hotels can be booked in around 39 languages, so Agoda ranks very highly in this regard.

Besides Visa, Mastercard and American Express, Agoda also accepts a multiple other minor credit and debit cards including JCB, UnionPay, Discover and Diners. Besides cards, they also accept Paypal, as well as AfterPay for bookings in AUD. Overall, it has an above average number of payment methods, and a very smooth payment experience.

Agoda has quite a good reputation when it comes to hotels, so we wouldn’t hesitate to book a hotel through them. Their Trust Score on TrustPilot is 3.9/5.0 at the time of writing which isn’t fantastic, but it’s also not too bad for a OTA going through COVID-19. As always, carefully check that the conditions of your room are before booking, particularly the cancellation policies.

Agoda offers telephone support (via local phone numbers), online chat via their app as well as email support. However they don’t make most of these options easy to find – usually you’ll have to click a “Show more options” link in the help section. When booking a hotel with Agoda, all three options appear to be available, whereas they aren’t when you book flights with them.

Overall, we consider that Agoda is definitely worth checking out no matter in the world you want to book a hotel. Considering they seems to share a lot of hotel inventory with Booking.com, and that we found their prices to in fact be better than Booking.com, we highly recommend you compare prices here first before booking elsewhere.