expecting target price < $2.49?, page-18

I am sure WTF is more expensive in some cases, I mean there are 5 or so strong competitors. But, a lot of the time this comes back to where you start your search.

Here's an example: If you use something like Trivago (deal aggregation), which Expedia bought into they have occasionally boosted the competitor prices by a small amount, usually around $5 so that Expedia looks cheaper. It also happens with Booking.com but I don't know if they have such an obvious financial arrangement with Trivago. This looks like a scam to me. The last 2 hotels I looked at on Trivago: Last Minute's price was $169 and Booking.com was $163. Clicking through on both prices they were actually $165 to book on both sites.

I think it is due to the dodgy marketing that some people think other sites are cheaper. If you look at a less biased source like Google Hotels the results are a bit fairer and show Wotif to be cheapest in about 20-30% of cases. Agoda actually looks the cheapest most of the time but in 2 out of 5 examples I just looked at, you click through and the rooms are actually gone or other times the rates are in US dollars and it ends up being more. I wonder if they show Google's bots a different thing to customers.

The one good thing most of WTF's competitors do is those "1 room left" and "2 people booked this today" pop ups. Although they can be annoying if you know they are mostly fake. The good thing Last Minute does is this: If you're booking 2 days it will still show you a deal for 3 days, potentially getting you to stay longer but also making them appear cheaper. At least that is a legitimate tactic.