Travel hack for booking hotels directly

As a frequent traveler, you’re always looking for little tricks to book hotel rooms at discounted rates.

My habit is to pick the hotel I’m interested in on the site BookingIt’s the site I think has the best interface, with plenty of quality photos, practical filters, complete descriptions, and often lots of reviews (even if you have to take them with a grain of salt).

Once I’ve selected the hotel I’m interested in, I check if I can get a better rate on hotels.com (which belongs to the Expedia group). Know that with hotels.com, I get the equivalent of 10% cashback (you earn a free night every 10 nights, at a rate equivalent to the average price of those 10 nights).

If I’m in Asia, I also check Agoda. Agoda belongs to the same group as Booking, but for some reason I can’t explain, it often offers better rates for properties in Asia.

Some people use price comparison sites, but these don’t always show the real prices, especially if you’re a Genius member on Booking. So I don’t use them.

Until now, I didn’t check rates directly on the hotel’s website to book directly. It’s always a bit tedious and, contrary to what you might think, the rates are rarely more interesting.

Until I discovered a little extension for Google Chrome browser: vsHotel.

This extension is kind of magical: when you’re browsing Booking, it tries to identify the hotel’s website and fetch the rate for your dates. If the rate is more interesting, you just click to go book directly on the hotel’s website.

Here’s a concrete example.

At this hotel, on Booking, I get a 10% discount thanks to my Genius status. So I get a rate of €129 per night.

But the vsHotel extension alerts me at the bottom right of my screen: by booking directly, I can get a rate of €122. I just have to click to go book directly.