Travelocity, Expedia, or Hotels.com are heavily advertised everywhere. They tell you how great their deals are, and how low they can sell you a room at the top hotel in town for. They explain this by saying, "Hotels can't sell out every single room, so we offer you those rooms for much cheaper than their going rate."
This couldn't be any more false.
Having worked in hotels for four years, I can assure you that when you book with them, the price that you pay will not be the lowest point of your stay.
First, there is usually a mistake in your booking. They are rather careless when actually inputting your requests in their computer system. You requested a room with two queen beds for your family of four when you booked it? Well, don't be surprised if you show up at the hotel and they actually typed into the computer system that you wanted a room with one king bed in it, that's probably a handicap accessible room, and the hotel is probably completely full. This is sometimes your best case scenario. They sometimes don't even book your reservation at all.
Yeah, they may be getting you the cheaper rate, but not without any strings attached.
The only time you're actually getting the cheaper rate, is when you snag that last room available. They are guaranteed a certain number of rooms in a hotel partner of theirs on any given night. So they can sell up to 25 rooms. But when a hotel doesn't even sell 25 rooms in the house, the rates drop faster than the roadrunner when he looks down after running off a cliff.
Hotels want to sell as many rooms every night as they can. They're willing to drop rates to lower than what Priceline or Expedia are offering. Why? So they can make the revenue without having to pay out a commission fee to these online companies.
Instead of selling a $75 room to someone and having to pay 20% commission to them, they'll sell the room for $65-$70 a night and keep all of it. These are just hypothetical numbers, but you get the process. So check with the hotel closer to the check-in date, even if you think you have already gotten the best rate in town.
Hotel employees will tell you time and time again how often they have had to deal with these companies customer service representatives and how awful they are. They outsource all of their customer service jobs overseas in order to pay cheaper wages and they don't care if there is a pretty significant language barrier.
Why does this affect you? When your hotel reservation is screwed up like I mentioned above, the hotel's front desk employee cannot change the reservation on their own. It has to clear Expedia's or Travelocity's computer servers in order to change the reservation in the hotel's computer. Ridiculous? Absolutely. Some hotels won't even bother calling the customer service hotline for you, which only starts your entire trip off on a negative note. Don't let this happen.
Remember those guaranteed rooms I mentioned before, too? That's on any given night. Say a hotel of 100 rooms has all 100 rooms sold. Travelocity is guaranteed seven rooms but hasn't sold any yet. They will oversell the hotel, make you prepay, and then the hotel will have to tell you that they do not have a single room for you.
You will then be pushed into the "walked guest" system. This takes hours for your reservation to get sent to another hotel in town (if there even is another hotel in town) that has a room available. We can't just cancel the reservation at the hotel, either. We have to go through the third party reservation company to get it sorted out.
If you're thinking, "Oh, this won't affect me, I never have to change my reservation and don't go to big events. I'm fine." Their business tactics may haunt you as well. Their website has separate themes to different hotel's pages that have an uncanny resemblance to the actual hotel's webpage. They get every single detail down to every word of the description of the rooms.
Plagiarism? Probably. Why do they do this? Because their main goal is to trick you into thinking, "I'm following that man/woman's advice at the hotel last time and not booking through a third party, so I'm going directly to the hotel's own webpage."
They realize that with their lack of customer care quality, they need to do whatever they possibly can do in order to get as many people to book hotels with them instead of the actual hotel itself. It's all about getting the commission in any possible way they can.
If you had any issue with these companies during your stay, and you want to file a complaint with the manager in hopes to get a discount off of your room rate, well, you're out of luck. The hotel can't even change that and give you any of your money back. Especially if you prepaid; if you prepaid, we don't even see your credit card number.
The hotel is given an "Expedia Virtual Credit Card" that has the exact amount of the hotel cost put onto the card. If we discount that credit card that's on file in the computer, it's only giving Expedia a break, and you're still being charged full price. The hotel is just giving more money to the original problem — Expedia or Travelocity.
Some have had great experiences with these companies and have received great deals on their hotels and vacation bookings. However, in my experience, I have seen a lot more negatives come out of booking with them than positives; and, as a hotel front desk associate, it's hard for us to help you when it's completely out of our hands.