If it feels like there are a lot of hotel comparison sites to choose from, it’s not your imagination—by my count there are dozens, all claiming to be the best. When I’m judging a hotel booking site, I’m not just looking at which has the lowest prices (though that definitely matters); I’m also looking at how easy it is to browse by location, filter for amenities, compare prices on different rooms, and to make sure the advertised price is the total price, since a few hotel booking engines still display the base rate and then tack on taxes and resort fees only farther along in the booking process.
How we review these hotel booking sites: Read our methodology for selecting and recommending booking sites.
Current winners: best hotel booking sites
Want to know more? Read my testing notes
Every few months I dig in and retest my recommendations to make sure I’m giving you the best advice. Here’s my current deep dive into the strengths and weaknesses of the top hotel booking sites. And for more advice and tips for booking hotels, check out my hotel booking tips at the end of this article.
1. Kayak
What Kayak does best
Kayak earns its following by being an overall easy and dependable metasearch (a tool that pulls from a bunch of hotel booking sites and displays all of them in one place) site. It’s also designed to be intuitive to use with clear search results displays that are easy to understand. Search results show a variety of accommodation and room types and you can then layer on filters to see specific hotels and rooms.
What I like about Kayak’s hotel search
As a metasearch, Kayak makes it easy to compare prices across online travel agent sites (OTAs) with listings that call out the lowest price but also let you see nightly rates across multiple hotel booking sites.
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When you search by location and date, you’ll see a variety of accommodations types including hotels, rentals, resorts, and guest houses. (If you want to narrow your lodging choices down, just unselect those you don’t want.)
Note that the default search results style doesn’t show you the cheapest hotel rates first; if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll need to select “Sort by Price.” Kayak also offers price alerts (toggle the switch at the top of the listings) so you can monitor prices across days, weeks, or months.
A newer addition is Kayak’s little AI tool that lets you essentially type in the type of hotel you want (“a beachfront hotel with a kid-friendly pool,” for example) and it will narrow search results for you. You can do the same thing by using the filters, but this is another option.
Note that hotel booking sites Booking.com, Priceline, Kayak, and Agoda are all owned by the same parent company, but they don’t necessarily offer the same prices for hotel stays. It’s worth putting in the extra effort to check one or more of these sites individually.
2. Booking.com
What Booking.com does best
Booking.com is great at allowing you to see a lot of different accommodations types in one search while also layering on filters that help you drill down to the amenities, layout, and offerings you want. It’s strong on both family-oriented filters and accessibility filters. And it gives you the standard option to filter by neighborhood, or, intriguingly by “guests’ favorite area” in a city, which offers an easy way to get a sense of central, pleasant neighborhoods.
What I like about Booking.com’s hotel search
Here’s what I like best about Booking.com: this hotel booking site mixes hotels, hostels, bed and breakfasts, vacation homes, and even apartments into its search results. You can sort by price, reviews, and even fun things to do on-property. And you can filter results by budget, hotel chain, star rating, location (distance from city center), and property type (apartment, hotel, hostel, etc.). There’s also an option to highlight hotels that focus on sustainability.
Booking.com also has an extensive filter list including accessibility options like elevators, wheelchair accessible rooms, roll-in showers, raised showers, bathroom emergency cord, and more.
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Once you click through on a property, you can see property and hotel room amenities, reviews, questions and answers about the property, and the price comparison by room type. There’s also info about prepayment, cancellation, and booking flexibility that’s easy to find.
Booking.com also has a “smart filter” AI tool that let’s you type in the sort of place you want (you can also do this via filters, but this gives you a second way of drilling down) and get suggestions.
3. Hotels.com
What Hotels.com does best
Hotels.com has a ton of different property types (including castles!). The system clearly flags less expensive and discounted hotel rooms in search results, and if you want, you can limit search results to hotels that offer free cancellation.
What I like about Hotels.com’s hotel search
The Hotels.com interface is easy to understand and quick to navigate. The hotel search engine has a remarkably robust mix of property types, including hotels, condo hotels, castles, B&Bs, vacation rentals, and more.
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If you’re looking to book for a family or a group, Hotels.com is a solid booking site, since it allows you to search both for family-friendly properties and by amenities like bathtubs, pools, and cribs. The hotel booking site clearly labels how many people (including number of kids) can fit into a particular hotel room type. You also have the ability to search for hotels that offer free cancellation. Overall, the search experience here is user-friendly and prices are competitive with other hotel sites, putting it near the top of my recommendations.
4-6. Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity
What Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity do best
Longtime giants in the space, Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity all have clear and user-friendly search interfaces. Another benefit: They’re well-known and generally trusted brands that offer competitive prices and comfortable familiarity.
What I like about Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity’s hotel search
Among the best-known of all hotel booking sites, Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity have something else in common as well: They’re all owned by Expedia, Inc. Prices fluctuate a bit among them, but the experience across all three is very similar. Which in a way is freeing: All you need to do is choose your favorite of the three and include it when you’re looking for a hotel deal.
Filters include hotel star rating, property type (hotels, vacation rental listings, apartments, B&Bs, and more), neighborhood and proximity to popular attractions (an easy way to gauge how close to a city center you’ll be), and more. You can specify the number of bedrooms you want in the case of vacation rentals. You can also specify that you’re looking for a family-friendly or LGBTQ (or both) list of properties. To do this, scroll to the “Traveler experience” section in the long list of filters.
7. Priceline
What Priceline does best
Priceline lists a good mix of hotels and other accommodations types, has some standout steep-discount finder features, and flags properties displaying with lower-than-average prices.
What I like about Priceline’s hotel search
Priceline was one of the first OTAs and it still has a devoted following and an easy-to-navigate site layout. Using Priceline’s filters, you can narrow by price, search by amenities (including swimming pool and free breakfast), hotel star rating, neighborhood, and hotel brand. In addition to listing hotels, Priceline also lists alternative accommodations types like apart-hotels, bed and breakfast properties, and rental apartments.
Priceline’s ExpressDeals and Pricebreakers are two ways Priceline offers even more significant discounts. In both cases, you find out the name of the hotel only after you reserve. ExpressDeals are the most deeply discounted, but you have to book knowing only the neighborhood, star rating, review score, and amenities. With Pricebreakers, you get discounts up to 50% off and can see three hotel names in advance. One of the three named hotels will be revealed as the one you get after you complete the booking.
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ExpressDeals can be adjusted to include more than two people per room; however, Pricebreakers are only available for double occupancy, which is fine if you’re booking rooms of two people each, but won’t work if you’re looking for a single room that will hold more than two people. To get access to either of these discounted options, enter all your search parameters and then in search results, scroll down until you see the “ExpressDeals & Pricebreakers” checkbox under the Deals section.
8. Tripadvisor
What Tripadvisor does best
Given its strength in the user-review space, it’s no surprise that Tripadvisor offers a useful mix of past-guest reviews along with metasearch comparisons that show you prices across hotel booking sites. It’s a good place to do multiple steps of the hotel booking process (reading reviews and comparing prices across booking sites) in one place.
What I like about Tripadvisor’s hotel search
Tripadvisor is best known for its massive (and always growing) collection of user reviews, but in recent years it’s also become a go-to site for comparing hotel prices across different booking sites.
On each hotel page, there’s a box that shows rates for the hotel (if available) on various hotel booking sites. Here you can also input specific travel dates and numbers of people to get the most accurate pricing. And in some cases, you might see a note with a link if a hotel is willing to match prices offered elsewhere. Keep scrolling and you’ll get to the hotel reviews, making it a pretty complete one-stop-shop for browsing hotels and comparing prices.
9. Hotwire
What Hotwire does best
Hotwire stands out with its cheap hotel deal finder and handy price alerts. It’s also a good source of last-minute hotel deals.
What I like about Hotwire’s hotel search
Hotwire offers the simplicity of a classic hotel booking site layout, but still has a number of the filter options people expect on today’s best hotel booking sites. Many people love Hotwire’s Hot Rates, which offer cheap hotel deals at undisclosed (until you book) hotels.
Hotwire also offers price alerts (available as a button in search listings), which is helpful if you’re hoping to wait to book until the nightly rate drops. And it’s a good place to search for last-minute hotel deals. Also of note is that Hotwire is pushing its app and says that its best deals are always reserved for bookings made through the app.
10. Google Hotels
What Google Hotels does best
Though it doesn’t have quite the following that Google’s airfare search has, Google Hotels offers a nice combination of helpful destination information and hotel listings, location-centered hotel listings, and metasearch hotel pricing listings.
What I like about Google Hotels’ search
To access Google Hotels, you have two options: navigate directly to Google’s Hotel page (integrated with Google Maps) or just do a Google search using the word “hotel” and your preferred destination. The hotel tool is integrated with Google maps, so if you’re a visual person looking to find a hotel in just the right location, it can be great.
Google Hotels, like Kayak, is a metasearch, and once you click through on a hotel, you can see prices across different hotel booking sites. There aren’t many filters in general, though if you click on Amenities you’ll see filters like “Pet-Friendly” and “Pool.” But, as a straightforward hotel booking metasearch option, it’s a solid choice, and one that displays automatically with a Google search.
Bonus: Tips on finding the best hotel deals
There are a lot of hotel search engines out there, all purporting to be the best site to book hotels. The truth is that no single website is going to offer the best deal every time, so comparing at least a few sites will be an important part of the pre-booking process. Price aside, there are other important reasons why certain sites make it onto this list and others don’t. Some offer better ways to search and filter results. Others offer a wider variety of hotel rooms. A few really do offer better hotel deals more often than the rest.
That’s a long way of saying that the best hotel website for you may change depending on your particular needs for a given vacation, so it’s worth not getting in a rut and just using the same booking site every time without first considering your needs for that trip. Here’s a fail-safe method for finding the best hotel room for every trip.
1. Start your search far enough in advance to be able to identify pricing trends.
Advance planners, this is your moment. Start comparing hotel rates a few weeks or month before your personal booking deadline (this deadline will vary depending on how comfortable you are leaving things open-ended until the last minute). This way, you’ll have the data you need to identify when a hotel room is getting cheaper, or more expensive. This is a big one, especially at a time when the going rate for hotels varies wildly by city and season.
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Some sites will flag pricing trends for you, but if you’re looking for the best price on a hotel room, nothing beats keeping tabs on pricing fluctuations on your own. It’s a little extra work but means you can jump on savings when you see it. Plus, it’s an excuse to think about your vacation well in advance of taking the trip, which adds to the excitement of going.
2. Compare prices across hotel booking sites.
Wouldn’t it be great if one hotel booking website offered the cheapest hotel rooms all the time? Until there’s a single best website to book hotels, it’s up to you to compare prices not just week to week, but also across hotel sites. You don’t have to be too extreme though: Include two to four sites in your search (and make sure one of them is a metasearch that will do some of the heavy lifting for you) and you’re very likely covering your bases enough to be able to see fluctuations.
3. Always check with the hotel, too.
Hotels (really) want you to book directly with them, so sometimes you can get a hotel brand to match or undercut the price you’ll see by looking at an online travel agent (OTA) like Expedia or metasearch site like Kayak. This approach can be worth the extra legwork, since it means you can work directly with the hotel if you need to adjust your reservation or have a problem with your hotel booking.
4. If you’re a points person, check with your credit card travel portal.
If you’re not a credit card points person, save your sanity and skip this explanation, but if you do collect credit card points with an eye toward using them for travel, don’t forget to go to your preferred credit card’s travel portal (such as AmEx Travel or Chase Travel) and see what they’ve got on offer. Not all hotels are in the system, and hotels vary a lot depending on the destination, but if you can get a hotel stay with points instead of cash money, that can make up for a certain amount of additional hoops and minor frustrations.
Just remember to do a quick comparison of what you’d pay in points versus what you’ll pay in cash. In some cases, points are undervalued so you have to decide if it’s a good use of points or if you’d rather save them for a hotel (or flight) that will get you better per-point value.
4. Be sure to compare the total price.
Some hotel sites always include taxes, fees, and resort fees. Other may not include those fees in the price they display. If you’re seeing a particularly cheap rate at a hotel, check both the room type and the total cost to make sure you’re comparing apples to apples in your price comparison across hotel booking sites.
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5. Don’t forget to read the fine print.
There’s a lot of fine print when it comes to hotel stays. If you need to cancel, how much of your money will you be able to recover? Will you be surprised by sneaky resort fees or other price hikes at checkout? Before you book, zoom in on the fine print so you know what you’re signing up for. It’s boring but super important.
6. Consider special travel booking needs.
Families and groups have different hotel needs than other travelers. Adjoining rooms, suites, kitchenettes, and other layout options can make a big difference when traveling with kids or a group. So do amenities like swimming pools. Some hotel booking sites are better for families and groups than others, so be sure to take advantage of the OTAs (mentioned below) that offer these features.
More Hotel Booking Questions, Answered
What are the best hotel comparison sites?
Start your search with any of the sites I’ve reviewed above and you’ll have a solid foundation for your hotel search. But also keep in mind that there’s no substitute for comparing prices across a few different sites (including the hotel’s own website) over a period of time. By keeping an eye on price fluctuations, you’ll be able to act on a good rate when it surfaces and feel confident about the price you book.
What hotel booking sites offer the cheapest deals?
No single hotel booking site offers the best price all the time. When you’re comparing hotel rates, make sure you’re doing an apples-to-apples comparison of the same room type that includes the same taxes and fees. When it comes to finding the best price on hotel stays, there’s no substitute for comparing prices and starting your search far enough in advance that you can watch prices for a bit before making your buying decision. Signing up for price alerts is an easy way to keep tabs on hotel prices as they change as well.
Why is it important to look beyond price when deciding on a hotel room?
When it comes to booking travel, it’s easy to fixate on finding that great flight deal. But airfare is not always the biggest ticket item, since the total you’ll pay for a hotel can add up fast.
In my own travels as a journalist and a vacation-loving human I’ve learned (and relearned) the importance of a good hotel room. I can deal with a few hours in a cramped seat on a plane, but when it comes to a hotel room—a place I’ll be spending at the very least eight hours each night—it has to be a good fit and within my trip budget. That motivates me to do the legwork of comparing prices across hotel booking sites.
