What is Hotel-scanners?
Hotel-scanners is a system of hotel search. It doesn’t book hotels, it helps searching them!
What is so good about Hotel-scanners? Why is it better than Booking.com and Agoda.com, for example? After all,
they negotiate with hotels for a good discount and booking with them is cheaper!
The answer is that Hotel-scanners is a meta-search engine and it is looking for profitable deals in the database of Booking, Agoda, Hotels, and many others. That is, you can see what the price per room is in the same hotel, but in the different reservation systems and choose where it is cheaper. The system has more than 5 million offers, which is more than any analog does.
How to Book a Hotel Room
And now let’s find out how to use the Hotel-scanners site. Actually, there is nothing complicated there, everything is intuitive and well thought out. All the important moments in the screenshots are highlighted with red lines.
The first thing we see going to the site is that this is the classical form of search on the main page.
Choose where we search for the hotel. The system offers options with a number of hotels and other tips. You can
enter a city, region, or even the hotel directly if you know its name. Let’s find Phuket.
Choose the dates of arrival and departure. Possible dates are displayed as a list or a calendar (to do this, click on the icon, similar to the mesh bag). We choose, for example, 5-6 June 2016 – one night, a double room. It is understood that usually people stop for more than one night, but that will be
simpler.
Select the dates of your stay in the hotel
Search Results
Click on the SEARCH and on the new page you will see the search results as a list of hotels sorted by default in the parameter Recommended (usually the most expensive hotels). As we can see, the list is very long – 1639 hotels to choose from. It’s too much. It will be difficult to find the right one. It is necessary to specify more precise search.
Go to Phuket page by clicking on the appropriate link in the row. Here on the right there is a map with all the hotels, and it is possible to search for your hotel by using it. Under the map you can see a list of places in Phuket that might be of interest to us: Airports nearby, attractions, different districts of Phuket, etc. All this will be represented as links. Let’s choose in Phuket, for instance, Karon. This is a beach and an adjacent resort area. That is, first we have found all hotels in general in Phuket and will now look the same, but only for Karon. And you choose that what suits you best.
It is worth noting that Hotel-Scanners knows Karon (it knows many areas, by the way), so we could have initially driven the search string not to Phuket, but Karon.
Page destination Phuket
Search form for Karon direction is the same as on the main page. Site remembers the data imposed by us on the main page, so the form is already filled. All you have to do it is to click Search.
We see the search results, now they are limited byonly 174 properties. It is possible to sort by price (by default they are always sorted by the parameter Recommended). On the left there is a list of filters (highlighted in red), where you can select the needed one. For example: the price range, Wi-fi, air conditioning, a swimming pool, the number of stars, rating and so on.
The list of hotels at Karon
Filters and Search Results Sorting
There are a lot of options to filter and select the desired hotel offers. Therefore I tell you what I would do. In this case, the sequence is not important, and you can do it the way it is more convenient to you.
Thus, despite the fact that we have a list of hotels in the desired area, firstly, there are still too many of them, and it is necessary to choose one, and secondly, a hotel may be too far from the sea. Third, you need to understand how good it is. So I put my desired filters and put a checkmark on prices, air conditioning, Wi-Fi, and rating. And then sort by price. It is possible to choose any other number of filters.
Be aware that we can filter out till nothing remains in the results. So in case if there are a few hotels left or no options at all, there is a filter to be removed. By the way, pay attention to the rating of the hotel and the filter rated – this is the very criterion of quality. I always try to choose hotels with a rating higher than 7, and preferably higher than 8. It is a kind of guarantee that everything will be okay.
Put a check mark in the right places and get in the results a total of 12 hotels. Now the selection will be much easier. Please note, we sorted the hotels by price.
Filtered search results of hotels at Karon
Initially, we were looking for a hotel for one night, so the price shown for one night only. And if you choose, for example, a week in June (from 7th to 13th), the site will show the price for the whole week. Just for you to know.
Map of Hotels
Still you have to choose from 42 hotels. Now it is time to look at the map where the hotels are located. Since they all fit in general (I check marked the needed filters) and all of them have high rating (8 and up), so I’ll just see the location of the first 3 Hotels on the map, they are the cheapest of the selected.
For each hotel there is a link to a map. Note the marker of the selected hotel is displayed in red and blue markers – the rest is filtered hotels, and yellow are all the found hotels, without filters. Those hotels that are on our search page (after the filters, that is, 12), are numbered as they are on the list (which we are sorted by price). That is, the marker with “1” is the first hotel from the list. There is no need in opening a map for each hotel – they can be seen on a single map.
The map with the marked hotels
Hotel Page
Click in the search results on its name and go to the hotel. There is a description of the hotel, its brief reviews, photos, ratings and maps. Already at this stage it is possible to understand if it is worth visiting.
If it is, then draw your attention to the bottom of the page to the list of reservation systems and prices. Actually, for the sake of that all we started our search. You can select as the cheapest and most familiar to you reservation system. The point is that sometimes the price can differ by 10-40%.
Hotel Page
Switching to Booking System
As most often I use Agoda and Booking, I usually choose one of these hotel reservation systems. Unless there is nothing else there with a drastic difference in price. Click on View Deal (in other browsers there is a button “Book”) in the line where it says Booking.com (or other reservation system).
Welcoming message of the reservation system site
From Hotel-scanners we are redirected directly to the part of the page containing the price of the room. Check prices consistent with what we saw on Hotel-scanners. Note that, for example, Agonda prices will be shown without charges, so it will be lower than the same on Hotel-scanners and the final price you will see already on the payment page. Hotels.com shows all at once as it is.
Room rates on booking.com
The first thing to do after checking the prices is once again to see the rating because Hotel-scanners shows the average rating for all reservation systems, and to me is interesting the ranking on Booking, it can be both higher and lower. To do this, scroll down the Hotel Page on Booking to the very top. There we see that the rating is 4.2 out of 5. Not bad!
Even if the rating is all right it makes sense to read at least some real feedback from the guests, before making a decision. You never know if there are some pitfalls. Click on the rating and go to the page.
Hotel Feedback Page on booking.com
If you are satisfied with everything, it is time to book a room. Once again, check the dates, check the hotel location on the map, read the conditions of the hotel (at the bottom of the page unit “Good to know” about the time of arrival / departure, transfer, placement of children, etc.) and start booking. It’s simple. Enter your name, credit card information (if necessary) and simply book. If you have an account with Booking, then after authorization the most of the data will be filled in automatically.
Choose a room on booking.com