Hotels and other accommodation

The best way to book accommodation

In most cases you can book your room with the hotel direct, although it is surprisingly difficult to get in touch with some - especially the smaller ones. However, we have found that although contacting the hotels direct will often get you a reasonable price, you will normally get a better deal going through one of the hotel room brokers or accommodation agencies - they have more bargaining power than you!

One or two of the big hotel groups, such as Accor, have a 'lowest price' promise, so when you have the best price from an agency, you can get the hotel owner to match or better it if you want to.

So even if you like to book direct with an hotel, we think you should get a price from an accommodation agency. These agencies include package holiday companies who also sell flights and accommodation separately.

Accommodation agencies

There are hundreds of accommodation or hotel agencies. Many are big name companies who advertise on the TV. Although the advertising makes these company names familiar, these familiar names do not necessarily offer the best deals.

Some people may recommend an agency if they have had a good experience with them. However, we do not think it is possible to say that a particular agency is always the one to go for.

This is because all of the accommodation agencies have their own arrangements with each hotel or hotel chain. Sometimes one agency will negotiate a better deal than another agency, but no single agency has negotiated the best deal with every hotel or hotel group, despite what they may say.

On each of the hotel review pages we list the agencies that are usually able to book rooms for you at that hotel. Those lists are in order. The agencies at the top are the ones that usually offer the best price for that hotel. The least competitive are towards the bottom. Sometimes the difference in price between the best few is very slim, and prices do vary from time to time, so it is worth checking the top two or three on the hotel review pages.

If we do not yet have a review for the hotel you are looking for, or if you do not know which hotel to choose and want to start with a list of hotels and prices, try the agencies in the right column of this page.

Again, we have tried to list them so that the ones offering the best deals are towards the top, but please remember that none of them has a contract with every hotel and none of them is best for all of the hotels they offer, so try as many as you can, starting at the top of the list, to make sure you get the best deal.

Hotel rooms from Package holiday companies

You can get room-only deals from some of the major package tour companies, but the names might be a bit confusing. Thomson is easy enough. It's Thomson! Hotelopia is also part of the Tui / Thomson group but they have their own web site. The Portland part of Tui never had hotel-only bookings and Thomson closed the Portland brand altogether in May 2011.

The MyTravel group, including Airtours and Direct Holidays are now part of Thomas Cook. Some of the Thomas Cook brands still have their own web site for packages, but hotel-only bookings for all of the Thomas Cook package holiday sites are only available through Thomas Cook. Even if you go to the front page of Direct Holidays or one of the others, you will redirected to the Thomas Cook site for hotel-only bookings. Hotels4U is part of Thomas Cook but is not a package holiday part of the company. It does have its own web site and own pricing structure, which tends to be quite a lot better than booking through the Thomas Cook main site.

The hotels part of Cosmos used to be called Somewhere-To-Stay, but was rebranded in May 2008 and is now called Monarch Hotels. Somewhere-To-Stay does still exist as a brand and as a web site, but it is intended for use by agents. Unless you are an agent it will not return a better price than Monarch Hotels. Although the Cosmos brand will continue for packages, the retail hotel-only part of Cosmos is now known as Monarch Hotels.

Protecting you booking

If you book your hotel separately, it may not be covered by ATOL, ABTA or similar schemes, so if your holiday is affected by flight delays or cancellation, or by local unrest, for example, you may not have any protection. Even if both your hotel and your flight are covered by an ATOL-type scheme, you may not be protected for one if the other one fails if you book them separately. For example, if your flight is cancelled you may not get compensation for any loss of hotel time if you booked flight and hotel separately. It is best to make sure you are insured for that kind of loss.

Alternatively, you have better protection if you buy a package - so it is worth seeing whether you can get what you want at a comparable price from one of the package holiday companies so that everything is covered by the likes of ATOL and ABTA.