Flight Centre vs Agoda 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.

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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.

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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.