Hotels Pricing at Travel Search Engines

Web 2.0 applications have been increasingly recognized as important information sources for consumers, including the domain of tourism. In the center of the travelers’ interest is the use of these applications in order to compare and choose hotels for their accommodation at various tourism destinations. It is important to investigate the issues related to the presence of the hotels on some of the most dominant tourism search engines and to the prices that they present. This paper compares the search engines and determines whether the cheapest and to the most complete one can be discovered. This paper focuses on analyzing the hotel prices presented on their official websites and on the following eight tourism search engines: Booking.com, Expedia.com, Hotelclub.com, Hotels.com, Orbitz.com, Priceline.com, Travelocity.com, and Venere.com. The data analysis, by the use of the descriptive statistics, showed that only 23% of the hotels examined are found at all the search engines. Furthermore, the price analysis showed that there are differences among the search engines. Although some search engines statistically give lower prices, there is not a single search engine that always gives the lowest price for every hotel.