By Reid Bramblett
There are three ways to find the best rates for hotels online: OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) through which you can book directly; aggregators, or meta-search engines, which troll the results of dozens of booking engines and return the best results; and the hotels’ own websites, which often offer specials and deals the OTAs can't match.
Why include OTAs at all when there are aggregators that canvass them? Because sometimes an aggregator will turn up a rate the booking engine doesn't, and vice-versa.
In order to rank them, we ran all the major sites through a battery of tests to determine which found ones the most options and the lowest rates—both in various price categories and on specific hotels—in Boston, Rome, and Hong Kong.
Wondering why Hotwire.com doesn’t make the list? Its search results are identical to those of corporate parent Expedia. However it does offer a "Hot Rate" blind booking service, similar to Priceline's, in which you can specify a star rating and a neighborhood—but don’t get the hotel's name until after you pay—and in exchange get savings of up to 60%.
Have you found better sites? Had bad experiences? Add your comment below.
Read more: http://www.frommers.com/slideshows/819303-best-and-worst-hotel-booking-websites#ixzz3slkv0xFV