Sunday, November 1, 2009

Don't Pay Too Much For Your Hotel In London

By Rajul Chande

Does it cost the earth to stay in a London hotel?

Many visitors to London certainly comment that London hotels are super-expensive. Do they have a point?

"Expensive" means something different to everyone. Often you can spend a lot of money and think it was brilliant, while at other times just the opposite is true. Cheap is not always best.

So what does the hard data say? London comes 5th in the ranking of the world's most expensive hotels, lagging behind Moscow, New York, Dubai and Venice (the source for this is Hotels.com).

A different survey (source: Hogg Robinson) suggests that London hotel prices are the 10th dearest. According to this survey, London hotels are cheaper than Stockholm and New York among others.

The bad news is that London is pricey because there is plenty of leisure and business demand to visit the UK's capital city. This unfortunately keeps prices high throughout the year.

The good news is that you can still get great value in London and London hotels but ONLY if you know where to look. To do so, you must use independent blogs (like the one linked below). Please do NOT rely on hotel or booking websites that only have a vested interest in selling you a room.

Ready for more good news? A separate survey (from the Economist) looked at the most expensive cities for all spending (beyond just hotel prices): this discovered that Paris and Copenhagen for example are a lot more expensive than London.

So while hotels in London look expensive to many overseas visitors, you have to benchmark this against the world's other premier tourist destinations.

The most important advice is to always book your hotel in London after searching out the best price on the internet. If you book based on just one website's pricing, you will almost always be missing out on the best rate.

Never be fooled by a best online rate guarantee. It is often hard to enforce this in practice (just try to read the small-print!) as well as being time-consuming.

The author of this article is a London hotels "insider" who has his finger on the pulse of London hotel pricing. There are big price differences for the same London hotel on different websites, so it is very easy to get ripped off if you are not well-informed.

There is just one way to ensure that you obtain the very best London hotel deal: you need to use a "meta-search" tool which compares lots of different websites at the same time (preferably more than 20 or 30 sites). It is now as easy to do a one-click search of many websites for the best deal as it is to search a single website.

The blog linked below has a price comparison tool which checks dozens of the world's best-known hotel reservation websites to find you the cheapest rate for your London hotel.

A hotel meta-search engine lets you feel secure that you're getting the best possible deal. It also means you're left with more money to enjoy London's amazing bars, restaurants and theatres!

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