Priceline vs Trip.com for hotels Bookings

Priceline

The most important thing to get out of the way is that Priceline belongs to Booking Holdings, also the parent of the world’s most popular hotel booking site, Booking.com. This therefore means that the hotels and pricing it has access to are generally the same, however the presentation on it’s website and some minor details are different. Where Booking.com is positioned as a worldwide brand, Priceline remains a predominantly North American affair.

Something particularly unique about Priceline are their Pricebreaker Deals where they present you with three different hotels in a certain city or area and the final price, however you don’t know which of the three hotels you actually get until you make the booking. Typically these hotel rates are well below the normal price so you know you’re getting a good deal no matter which hotel you get, but of course you don’t get to choose. They’re also non-cancellable so if you don’t like the hotel they choose for you it’s too bad. We find that the search experience on Priceline is above average. For most basic queries it works very well, although it doesn’t support state or country based searches, well not very well anyway. What it does offer though that most other sites don’t is the ability to search by address. Enter an address, for example that friend who’s house you’re visiting, and the system will show you the closet results to that address. It seems that most of the hotels reviews, at least for those outside of North America, come from Priceline’s parent company Booking.com. While the number of reviews is quite good, we found that the functionality wasn’t so impressive. It’s possible to filter by type of traveller, but not by anything else, which means you can’t sort by room type or by bad reviews to find the ones most relevant. On the individual hotel page the map is very disappointing. Although it clearly shows the hotel, it doesn’t have any other data points for things like attractions or restaurants, and there’s not even anything like the distance to the nearest airport. In fact, distance to the airport and major landmarks and airports doesn’t exist on the hotel information page at all. From our point of view, this is a massive shortcoming when it comes to booking hotels on Priceline, especially when all the other travel sites have been providing this for a long time. Priceline offers both prepaid and pay at hotel type rooms, as well as refundable and non-refundable rooms. What we found a little bit odd if that often the non-refundable room rate was more expensive than the refundable one, and sometimes the rates were the same price – it’s a little bit of a mystery why Priceline even displays these rooms.

As with the other major hotel booking sites, Priceline doesn’t charge any kind of booking fee or payment fee. From our testing, we returned similar pricing to Booking.com for most of the hotels although some had some significant different, indicating that at least sometimes, they run different pricing strategies. If you’re looking for the absolute cheapest price, Priceline wouldn’t be high on our list, but definitely worth checking if you want to cover all bases.

Since Priceline is partnered with Booking.com, their availability is excellent. Both the number of hotels and accommodations, as well as the availability of those accommodations can’t be matched by other travel sites overall. As their primary focus in on western countries, you can sometimes find that in other regions local competitors have offer a better selection.

Flights can be booked via Priceline’s mobile app, website or mobile website. What’s unusual though it that Priceline only offers an English interface, which really emphasizes that its product is built for the North American market.

Credit card options on Priceline are a little bit limited, but it will depend on which currency you are paying in. If you’re paying in USD, you can pay with MasterCard, Visa, American Express and Discover, however with some other currencies only MasterCard and Visa are available. PayPal is also accepted, but once again not for all currencies. If you’re paying in USD you also have a “Pay Over Time” option, where you can make four interest-free payments through Affirm.

If we compare Priceline’s ratings with other travel sites on platforms like Trustpilot, they are generally fairly high, although these ratings platforms are always subject to a degree of manipulation.

Priceline offer a local phone number for around 50 countries worldwide, but it will take a bit of digging through their menus to find them. They also appear to offer customer service by text message. When compared to other travel sites though, they don’t appear to offer and kind of online chat option or even email.

We wouldn’t hesitate to book with Priceline, but at the same time we also wouldn’t highly recommend them, as their offering is fairly generic. The Pricebreaker deals are definitely worth paying attention to though, especially if you’re traveling around North America.

Trip.com

Trip.com is backed by the massive Trip.com Group, the world’s second largest online travel group which also owns Ctrip, the largest online travel agency in China. With such backing and excellent buying power, Trip.com is undergoing a rapid worldwide expansion, and if you haven’t heard of them in your own country yet, it’s probably just a matter of time.

Trip.com’s hotel product is quite mature, and compares well with its main rivals of Booking.com and Expedia. It allows you to either prepay or to pay directly at the hotel depending on what you prefer, although it depends on the hotel. It features a relatively powerful search which allows you to search by city, region, landmark, airport and more although we sometimes found some strange results when testing. Where Trip.com falls down is by featuring a large number of the same room with different booking conditions making it difficult to work out what the best deal – for a great solution to this problem they should look to Expedia. Typically the differences between the options are that some include breakfast and some don’t, some are non-refundable while others offer free cancellation, and some are confirmed instantly whereas others have longer confirm times. In this aspect Trip.com is quite transparent, often other travel sites don’t have you how long it will take to confirm your room. Disappointingly, on the main search results page they only offer a single picture for each hotel, whereas the others feature multiple images or image sliders. While it’s not going to make a huge difference, these little features add up to a much nicer booking experience. Speaking of images, Trip.com is also lacking up-to-date and high quality images of a lot of hotels when compared to the competition. For hotels in Asia, Trip.com offers a reasonable range of reviews, but outside of Asia the reviews can be seriously lacking compared to the competition. When I say this, there’s actually a lot of reviews for each site in Chinese which are most probably bought across from their Ctrip brand, with a handy button to translate these if you require. Trip.com clearly marks rooms as either having free cancellation or being non-refundable, so they’re pretty good with transparency. Interesting, Trip.com offers what they call a service guarantee on their hotel bookings, which includes significant compensation if things go wrong like you turn up to hotel and there’s no room available for you. A cool feature that we’ve noticed lately on Trip.com is that you can set price alerts on a hotel, so that when the price drops below amount they’ll let you know through email – there’s not many other travel sites which offer this. Unlike a lot of the smaller hotel booking sites, almost everything can be done by yourself on Trip.com including cancellation, date changes and updating your personal information which is hugely useful and time saving. As with most of the competitors, you can filter by just hotels, or to include things like services apartments, hostels and villas. The location filters are also quite powerful, especially in Asia where they have the data to back it up. You can filter by metro line and even metro station, as by attraction or airport. One thing Trip.com doesn’t offer that some of the other major sites do is a Best Price Guarantee where they offer to match the price of their competitors.

You might have seen Trip.com frequently showing up of comparison sites due to their sharp pricing. Speaking generally, their pricing is extremely competitive with the other major players, although they tend to have the best prices in the Asia Pacific region, while Europe and the US are typically similarly priced to Booking.com and Expedia. Trip.com doesn’t add an extra service fees in the case that you need to deal with their customer service which is always nice.

Trip.com uses booking their own hotel contracting as well as that of some of it’s competitors. This means that once again it has excellent inventory in Asia (and particularly greater China) and reasonable inventory in other markets too.

Trip.com is available on Desktop, Mobile and through their mobile apps for both Android and iOS which they market aggressively. Due to their parent company being China based (where mobile apps are almost the ONLY choice), they too deliver an excellent app experience. In terms of languages they are available in around 20 – much less than Booking.com, but still very commendable.

Trip.com charges no booking fees on all of it’s hotel bookings which is definitely a plus. They also don’t add credit card fees on top which can save you a few percent, although of course if you choose a pay-at-hotel room it will be down to the hotel itself as to whether or not you a charged a credit card fee. Payment is available in 20+ currencies and they accept all major credit cards, as well PayPal (major currencies only), iDEAL for the Europe market, and Apple Pay and Google Pay if that’s your preference.

Being a newer player in the international market, Trip.com probably hasn’t built up it’s reputation the same way that more established online travel companies have. Having said that it’s mobile app in particular gets quite good reviews, and it’s TrustPilot score is also reasonable.

Trip.com offers customer service in a huge range of languages, however only the major languages offer 24/7 service. In additional to phone service, they also offer email support and mobile chat through their app or website.

Trip.com is absolutely a site which you should be considering if you thinking of booking a hotel. With massive buying power, there are some great deals to be found at times, and their mobile app experience is award winning. If you are looking at traveling in the APAC region this should be one of your first choice, however it’s definitely worth taking a look at no matter where in the world you’re traveling.