Despegar vs Klook for hotels Bookings

Despegar

Despegar is the largest online travel agency on Latin America. It’s mainly available in Spanish, however it does have an English version as well, although it’s mainly based at the US, and people traveling between the two regions. That being said, it is indeed possible to book accommodation anywhere in the world so we’ve included it in our comparison.

Both prepaid and pay-at-hotel type bookings are offered which it always handy. This will of course depend on the individual property, some will offer both payment types and others will only offer one. The Despegar booking system allows you to leave special requests, however you can only pick from a set selection, you can’t write your own. On the booking page they have a particularly interesting feature where you can be kept up to date about any changes to your booking through SMS or even Whatsapp.

From out testing we found that Despegar had good pricing in Latin American, especially in Mexico. It also had reasonable pricing in the southern United States, particularly for the lower end of the market. When it comes to other overseas destination however, we didn’t find their pricing particularly competitive.

Coming soon

Despegar has a mobile app available on both Android and iOS, while it also has desktop and mobile versions of its website. As already mentioned Despegar is aimed at the Spanish speaking market, so it’s mainly accessible in Latin America. They do also have an English version too, however they don’t support any other languages at this stage.

Despegar accepts major credit and debit cards, and in some cases you can also pay with a bank transfer. Visa, MasterCard and American Express are all accepted. Besides prepaid hotels they also offer pay-at-hotel options for some hotels.

In Latin American Despegar is the biggest and most trustworthy local player. Outside of this region though they have little to no reputation.

Despegar provides customer service through a single phone number, which incurs no cost if you’re calling from a landline. As an bonus extra, they also offer VoIP calling through their app. This will particularly come in handy when you’re traveling and only have a Wi-Fi connection.

For the English-speaking target audience of this website, Despegar probably doesn’t rate near the top of your list of travel site choices. While their offering is pretty solid, the limited availability outside of Latin American means that unless you’re traveling to this area, it probably isn’t a real option. If you area however, and particularly if you’re traveling on a tight budget, they might be worth a quick look.

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.