Don’t Pay Too Much For Your Hotel In London
Does it cost the earth to stay in a London hotel?
While the common perception is that London hotels are pricey, is this really true?
Expensive is a relative term. You can have a wonderful priceless experience or spend little and find it poor value. Value is not easy to define.
What then does the hard data say? London apparently has the 5th most expensive hotels in the world, after Moscow, New York, Dubai and Venice (source: Hotels.com survey).
An alternative study by Hogg Robinson indicates that hotel prices in London are in 10th place, behind cities such as New York and Mumbai as well as quite a few others.
The bad news is that London is pricey because there is plenty of leisure and business demand to visit the UK’s capital city. This unfortunately keeps prices high throughout the year.
But there is good news too. You can still grab value for money in London hotels but only if you search carefully. To achieve this, you should use independent blogs (such as London Hotels Insight) rather than hotel or booking websites which just want you to reserve any hotel as quickly as possible.
Ready for more good news? A separate survey (from the Economist) looked at the most expensive cities for all spending (beyond just hotel prices): this discovered that Paris and Copenhagen for example are a lot more expensive than London.
Hence although London (and its hotels) may appear quite pricey to visitors, this must be understood in comparison with other benchmark cities.
The most important advice is to always book your hotel in London after searching out the best price on the internet. If you book based on just one website’s pricing, you will almost always be missing out on the best rate.
Never be fooled by a best online rate guarantee. It is often hard to enforce this in practice (just try to read the small-print!) as well as being time-consuming.
The author of this article is an “insider” within the London hotel market and knows for a fact that some hoteliers charge different rates through different websites.
There is just one way to ensure that you obtain the very best London hotel deal: you need to use a “meta-search” tool which compares lots of different websites at the same time (preferably more than 20 or 30 sites). It is now as easy to do a one-click search of many websites for the best deal as it is to search a single website.
For example, the blog on London hotels linked below searches 30+ online booking websites to identify the best London hotel rate within a matter of seconds.
Using a meta-search price comparison tool allows you to be absolutely sure that you’re getting value for money. That way you can have more money left to actually enjoy London!
Before booking your London hotel, please make sure that you check the London Hotels Insight blog for trustworthy information on selecting your ideal London hotel. The blog is written by the author of a book on London hotels and has a handy meta-search tool which searches 30+ websites to get you the cheapest deal.