If you see an amazing deal online for cheap hotels in Omaha, chances are that the website is giving it to you not because the website magically gets deals, but because that particular hotel let them have that kind of deal on their website. I’ll give you an example…
Magnolia Hotel Omaha, the first hotel you see on hotels.com when you search for the Omaha area, at the time this article was written, has a deal for $104.30 per night for a hypothetical stay between May 19th and May 21st. The second lowest price online is on Orbitz for $139.69. I called the Magnolia hotel and was given some ridiculous number, $159. This is the price they give to suckers. I said, “Is that the best you can do?” I told her that there were deals online. She said, yes, we can match the price on our website. She gave me a lower price, this time a lower number, which she got from the hotel’s own site. I asked her if she could go any lower. She said that yes, “we can match any price online”, a far cry away from the original $159 and very different from the time she told me that she can only match the price on the hotel’s website. I told her that hotels.com was offering at $104 per night and she offered to match the price. Clearly, the hotel itself decides what the deals will be and the websites simply advertise these rates, determined by the hotels. I believe that hotels.com has better deals on their hotels than its competitors because it has better relationships with hotels.
Of course, some hotels in the Omaha area will offer special deals which you can only find by calling them. In the end, I think that there is no right way to buy a hotel. But just like when you are shopping for anything. Don’t settle for the first thing you see. Travel sites throw out so many commercials so that you have brand loyalty to them and don’t bother looking elsewhere for deals. Don’t settle, shop around, save money. That way, you can find not only cheap hotels in Omaha, but hotel reservations with value.
