How DirectHotels.com can save you money on your next vacation

*Disclosure: This is a sponsored post. The opinions expressed here, however, are my own.

As long-time readers of this blog surely know, I travel quite a lot. A few years ago, I only took about 2-3 trips per year, not including trips in the state of Michigan (Grand Haven weekends, etc.), but this past year, I was fortunate in that I was able to travel very frequently.

I recently heard about a new travel site, DirectHotels.com, which is similar to Kayak.com, in that it searches all of the other travel sites (Orbitz, Expedia, etc.) to find the best deals for you. I gave it a bit of a test run to see if that is indeed true.


About the site:
DirectHotels.com is a new hotel comparison tool that challenges the big brands. Travelers can easily compare all the travel sites in one place to find the cheapest hotel. DirectHotels.com compares over 200 bookings sites, so users can be sure about its accuracy. Using DirectHotels.com means that you will never overpay.

I did a few sample searches, the first one being Vegas in April, since I'm fairly familiar with the hotels there. Here are the first few hotels it found:


For Circus Circus (admittedly, a bit of a "bargain" hotel), the best deal it could find for four nights was $253, on Travelocity. For the Stratosphere hotel, a bit farther down on the Strip, it found four nights for $197, on Hotelopia.com. You can also see other options below, such as $184 on elvoline.com, $211 on skoosh.com, etcetera.

For my next search, I put in Orlando, from 1/11-1/15, since that is when I am traveling there. I wanted to see how much the Hilton Bonnet Creek was (the hotel I stayed at for BlogHer this summer, and where I'll be spending 2 of my 4 Orlando nights next month), so I limited my search to hotels that had "Hilton" in the name.


Hilton Bonnet Creek is quite lovely, and therefore, not cheap: the best deal it found was $801 for 4 nights, on Travelocity.

A word of caution: when I clicked through to see if that included taxes, etc., it did not. The final price for that deal ($200/n) on Travelocity was $901.68, "due" when you pay on the site, and then another $140 at the hotel, for the $35/day resort fee.


I'll admit that the site is a little confusing—you can see above that it touts itself as having discount codes directly from the hotels to give away to its users, but after using the site for a few searches, I didn't see anything in any of the search results about that.

However, I like that the site compares other search sites and gives you the best rate that it can find—it is definitely a time-saver in that aspect. Instead of having to bring up Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia, etc., and search individually on each site, DirectHotels.com does the work for you.


Have you ever used DirectHotels.com? If not, what's your favorite site to use for booking travel?


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