American Web Hotels

If you are looking for Omaha cheap hotels, or any discount hotel from any city, there’s a very good chance that you need a hotel and a flight. In one of my earlier articles I concluded that all of the hotel booking sites are virtually the same in terms of pricing if you look at their standard listings of hotels. By “their” I mean hotels.com, orbitz.com, travelocity.com, orbitz.com, and priceline.com. By “standard”, I mean their listings of hotels only, not packages. I also concluded that hotels.com has the better deals in its standard listings of hotels. This time I want to look at what type of package deals I can get from a site like Travelocity. More specifically, I want to see if their advertised vacation package deals are as good as they seem, using the Omaha area as an example. So, how do you know if you are really getting a “deal” when you purchase a package from Travelocity? Follow these steps (I’m assuming you a purchasing a flight+hotel package):

Once you type in your criteria, you’ll first see that Travelocity automatically gives you a “Lowest Package Price Option” for your flight. You need to find out what this lowest package price option really is. How? Simply pretend to book a flight separtley, using the same search criteria you used when you searched for your vacation package. When selecting your flight options, select the same flights and times you see on the “Lowest Package Price Option”.

Travelocity.com

Travelocity.com

Now , go back to your search results for your vacation packages. Most of your advertised Travelocity savings will range from $7-$30. However, there will be some where the savings are huge, in the neighborhood of $100, $200, $300. Let’s say you see a deal where the advertised savings are for $118 for a hotel. Travelocity says that if you book separtley, you will pay $529. Whereas if you book together, you pay $411. Since you already know what the flight costs as part of your vacation package for a hotel and a flight, you need to find out what happens if you book your hotel separtley off of Travelocity.com. Simply type in the same search criteria as you did when you searched for your hotel+flight package. Once you find the same hotel, you can now add the cost of the hotel to the cost of the flight you found out earlier. To compare apples to apples, when finding out the price of your hotel, make sure to select the same hotel room type that is automatically given to you in the vacation package. You will likely find that, indeed, Travelocity advertised correctly when they gave you your vacation package savings. However, sometimes you’ll find that the “booked separtley price” does not match up with your numbers. Whether or not it matches up, you can now see whether the price for the hotel and flight deal within the package combines to give you the deal you are looking for. It would be wise to check other hotel booking sites or to contact the hotels themselves to make sure that they are not offering anything that would render your Travelocity savings meaningless. I once found hotels.com to be offering huge savings at the same time Travelocity was offering their package savings for the same hotel. I found Travelocity’s rates on their flights to be competitive, but you might get a better deal elsewhere online.

You might have figured this out by now, but the package savings depend mightily on the room type.

In one of the vacation packages I got for my hypothetical tests, I was given a savings of over $300. As part of my vacation package I was automatically given a “Queen Deluxe Room”. I found out the price of the flight and hotel, if I had booked the two separtley. Sure enough, had I booked the hotel separtley, I would have have to pay $300 extra because this “Queen Deluxe Room” was $100 more expensive per night than the other two types of rooms if I booked the hotel separately. BAM! $300 in “savings”. A call to the hotel confirmed that there is little difference between the room types. In fact, the hotel itself charged the least for its Queen Deluxe Room! The $300 in savings were a direct result of Travelocity having a ridiculously high price for a hotel room type in its standard listings of hotels and then removing this inflated expense in the vacation package. To add further insult to injury, I called this hotel and got a rate of $60 per night. I’d be saving hundreds of dollars by skipping this package deal altogether by purchasing the flight from Travelocity and booking the hotel directly from the hotel itself! This was one of the cheap hotels in Omaha Nebraska, and I had no way of knowing just by looking at Travelocity.

Travelocity.com, $316 in savings?

Travelocity.com, $120 more for the "Deluxe Room One Queen Bed" in its standard hotel listings

You might see, when you are checking the price of the hotel on Travelocity, pretending to book it separately, that there are discounts for the same room type you see in the vacation package. The advertised $120 discount for the vacation package might very well be a $70 discount. Sure, it’s a discount, but not nearly as much as advertised.

The prices Travelocity gives on its packages can change rapidly. This is because the “lowest” flight option availiable can change within a minute.

You can get good deals off of Travelocity when you buy a vacation package. You just have to make sure that your savings are really savings.

Key Points:

• Travelocity gives you a a “book separtley” price. You need to find out what this price consists of. This will give you a base from which you can decide whether or not you are really getting a deal. You can still get good savings if other sites have lower rates, it just means that your savings aren’t as high as advertised.
• When checking the hotel price, match the room type you see in the vacation package. You might see that your room type has a grossly inflated price which gives you your “savings”. You might also notice that the same room type has a special discount in the standard hotel listings, which decreases your overall package discount.
• Check hotel booking sites like hotels.com or see what type of rates the hotel itself has for the room type you see as part of your vacation package.
• Don’t be lazy. Sure, this takes a little work. But with 10 minutes of a research you can end up saving hundreds of dollars. Whether you want a cheap hotel in Omaha or some other destination, cheap flights to Miami or to Los Angeles, you want to make sure that what you are getting is indeed, cheap.