Section 01 · Who takes the money
Online travel agencies that take the booking, hold the payment and own the cancellation policy. We look at inventory, the total price at checkout, loyalty value, and what actually happens when a stay goes wrong.
Ranked
Ties are broken by publication date. A score reflects the platform as reviewed; terms change, so check the operator before you pay.
The widest inventory in travel, sold on the most forgiving cancellation terms in the business — and backed by the least satisfying dispute process of any platform we scored above 8.
Nothing else comes close on inventory or on free cancellation, and the Genius discount is real money. The weakness is what happens after something goes wrong at the property.
The strongest hotel pricing in Asia by a clear margin, wrapped in the least honest price display of any major platform we tested.
Agoda genuinely undercuts its sister brands across Southeast Asia and Japan. The catch is a price that grows between the search result and the payment page.
Buy your Shinkansen seat and your Shanghai hotel in one place — then close the app before it sells you four more things.
Trip.com sells things its Western rivals cannot: China rail tickets, Japanese domestic flights, and hotel inventory across East Asia at prices that hold up.
A single good idea — ten nights buys the eleventh — attached to an otherwise ordinary Expedia Group booking site.
After two years inside Expedia's One Key experiment, Hotels.com has returned to the ten-stamps-one-night reward that made it worth using. The rest of the site is unchanged, for better and worse.
The best interface in hotel booking, attached to an inventory pool that only exists in about a hundred cities after four in the afternoon.
Book tonight, in this city, in four taps. Nine years after Airbnb bought it, HotelTonight remains the fastest same-day hotel app and the narrowest.
Still the best place to bundle a flight with a hotel, and a worse place to be loyal than it was twelve months ago.
Package bundling is still Expedia's genuine advantage. Everything attached to it — One Key earning, the price guarantee, flight rewards — got worse this year.
Genuinely cheaper if your dates cannot move and you do not mind which mid-range chain you end up in. Worthless to everybody else.
The opaque rate still works. You save money by agreeing not to know which hotel you have bought until after you have paid for it — and by giving up your refund.
The deepest opaque hotel discounts in the US market, sold with the least information and no way back.
The discount is usually bigger. The information you get before paying is thinner. For a one-night stopover that is a good trade; for anything else it is not.
