Who knew booking a hotel room
could be so complicated? OK, we all did. But Search Party, a
start-up based in Mountain View, Calif., provides a valuable if
imperfect service that enables consumers to compare apples to
apples when shopping on the Web for a room.
Search Party, a
travel search service with maybe a million dollars or so in venture
funding, may not be particularly well regarded by Travelocity, Expedia.com and
Hotels.com.
Thats because Search Party is offering a downloadable desktop tool
that just may be a best-rate-guarantee buster.
It also exposes, to
some degree, the varying amounts that third-party sites charge for
taxes and fees.
If you download the
tool from SearchParty and perform a hotel search on Hotels.com,
Expedia or Travelocity, Search Party Desktop opens a side window
with a grid comparing room rates, taxes and fees, total price,
cancellation policies and payment terms.
For example,
Hotels.com offered a deluxe garden room at the Catamaran Resort
Hotel in San Diego as part of the Hotels.com price guarantee for
the nights of June 9 and 10 for $229 per night plus taxes and fees
of $65.46 for a total price of $523.46.
But, the Search Party
tool showed that OneTravel.com offered the same room type on the same
dates at that property for $174 per night plus taxes and fees of
$31.04, for a total price of $379.04. Thats a $144.02 difference on
a two-night stay.
Not only did
OneTravel beat Hotels.com on the room rate itself, as did Search
Party partners Reserve Travel ($185) and LastMinuteTravel.com ($197.50), but OneTravel also
charged a lower percentage than Hotels.com in taxes and fees: 8.9%
versus 14.3%.
Thus, the room rates
only told part of the story. Search Party wades through the thicket
and provides the fine print on the rest.
Search Party, which
has agreements with OneTravel, ReserveTravel, LastminuteTravel.com,
Lodging.com,
InterContinental, Hilton and Cendant hotel brands, among others,
claims to find lower rates than Travelocity, Expedia and Hotels.com
about half the time.
Eric Christensen,
president of Search Party and previously chairman and CEO of
WorldRes, said Search Party doesnt search Orbitz with its desktop
tool because it hopes to partner with Orbitz, whereas Travelocity,
Expedia and Hotels.com already have refused to play.
Search Party was
founded two years ago and unveiled the beta version of its site in
April. Like other travel search sites, it hopes to cash in on
referral fees when consumers do their comparison shopping on
SearchParty.com and then book hotels on partner Web
sites.
Several interesting
cat-and-mouse games may be in the offing. Travelocity, Expedia and
Hotels.com can tweak their sites to block SearchParty from pinging
them, but SearchParty techies can respond by tweaking their queries
to outsmart the big boys.
And, then there is
SideStep, which has its own downloadable comparison-shopping tool.
I have both downloadable tools on my desktop.
When I searched
Hotels.com for San Francisco hotels on given dates, the SideStep
window kicked in next to it, displaying the properties of several
advertisers in the city. But, when I selected a specific San
Francisco property on Hotels.com, the Search Party window appeared,
replacing the SideStep tool. So, programmers from Search Party and
SideStep likely will be trying to out-program each other, as
well.
At this point, Search
Party is probably a minor annoyance to major travel Web sites. And
it faces challenges.
In addition to
hitting someone up for marketing dollars, it has some technological
hurdles. On several searches that I tried, it didnt work at all,
merely providing the message that it didnt have any
data.
Still, the company is
something of a great equalizer in helping consumers navigate the
morass of making a hotel booking.