More on Internet Bargains

Since my experience with the customer who thought she got such a great price from one of those big travel websites I have been doing a lot more checking of travel prices. Wow! What you can learn by surfing the Internet.

I found a travel website that comes up very prominently with any Google search. The company runs a lot of paid Google ads and the name sounds great. Cheapsomething.com. Well cheap anything sounds good to me. The site even brags about the fact that is offers luxury for less and that it has won various travel awards. After my experience of the previous weekend I was interested in checking this out.

So I priced out seven days at one of my favorite resorts on our system. The price on our system was $2,467 per couple. The price on cheap.com was $2688. So right off the bat cheap.com was $221 more expensive. But then I followed through to the actual reservation page and cheap.com wanted another $161 in fees and taxes. Now there are no additional fees and taxes with this resort. The price is the price. $2,467 per couple, all inclusive, period. Nothing more. Yet if you booked on cheap.com you would pay $382 more.

Of course, then I got to thinking. How is it that this site can place so many ads on Google? How do they pay for it all? Well obviously by charging a little more to those unsuspecting customers who think cheap.com really means you get a better price.

A couple of things to know about travel on the Internet. First, there are hundreds if not thousands of “store front” websites that actually access the same database, so the prices will be the same regardless of which site you check (ever notice how you can check three sites and get the same price on all of them?). Second, when bargains do occur, many of the sites will feature those bargains simultaneously because they are all accessing the same database. Third, the one place you can find real bargains is when a travel company has contracted or guaranteed a resort or hotel for a specific number of rooms, and must pay for those rooms whether they are sold or not. If they don’t sell the rooms, they will discount them so the rooms don’t go empty. But usually these deals are not available until a few weeks before the date of travel, so if you’re planning in advance, it’s tough to take advantage of them.

Our policy is to price our vacations fairly and to constantly be checking with the resorts so that if prices change, we can pass the savings along to our customers. Our best prices are always when we are able to block out a large block of rooms, or when we do an entire resort takeover (such as our upcoming takeover at Caliente Caribe).

There are some very good reasons to book through a company such as Dream Pleasure Tours (see “Five Reasons to book with us") and I’ve just found another one. Those cheap.com websites may not be delivering to you the cheap deals they promise.

Connect with other travelers and hear what they have to say at the World Exotic Travel Club.

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