| A1Tourism |
Simple to use and comprehensive directory of hotels in the UK with detailed information and links through to booking. You can use the search option to look for something specific like UK hotels nearest to attractions, but most people will just click on the map or a city name to start. They also feature hotels worldwide. Uses the ActiveHotels booking engine. |
| Agoda.com |
Online hotel agency specialising in the Asia-Pacific region. Part of Priceline.com. |
| BookDirectRooms.com |
Small and medium-sized hotels, guesthouses, B&Bs, campsites, cottages and farms in the UK. |
| Cottages4you |
 10,000 holiday cottages in the UK. Sister site to Villas4you covering rental properties abroad. |
| Design Hotels |
German-based directory and reservations site specialising in designer hotels worldwide. Lots of stylish pics and trendy graphics. |
| Drake & Cavendish Luxury Hotels |
Excellent and intuitively easy-to-use directory of over 5,000 luxury hotels around the world with direct links, contact details, photos, and sometimes reviews, for each hotel. |
| EnjoyBed&Breakfast.com |
Specialist online booking site for UK B&Bs. |
| Epoque Hotels |
Stylish collection of 200+ boutique hotels worldwide with simple online realtime booking & confirmation. |
| HolidayCheck.com |
Major European (based in Switzerland) accommodation portal with over 300,000 properties worldwide and its own verified user review system. |
| HolidayHotels.com |
Part of Lastminute.com. Accommodation-only site offering hotels and apartments at resorts and cities throughout Europe and America |
| HolidaysRental |
Dutch operated site offering a wide selection of properties throughout Europe. |
| HomeAway |
One of the main players in the UK with over 250,000 properties worldwide |
| Hotel Anywhere |
Independent discount hotel reservations agency. They offer discount prices with a 'Price Match Guarantee' and unusually for an Accommodation Only Specialist, they are fully bonded (Travel Organiser Failure Cover from Travel & General Insurance Company). |
| Hotel Direct |
Discounted hotels in London, Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Edinburgh, Madrid, Rome, and a few other UK & Irish regional cities. |
| HotelGuide.com |
Swiss-based online hotel booking engine with a database of 85,000 hotels worldwide. Use it directly (you'll need to register) or find it on sites like Farebase.net. |
Hotelopia |
Hotelopia, part of the First Choice group, offers reduced-rate accommodation to both business and leisure travellers at over 25,000 properties, budget to 5-star, in over 900 destinations throughout Europe, North America, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. Unlike many online agencies, Hotelopia doesn't keep customers at arms length. They have a call centre open for customer support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. |
| HotelPronto |
Launched Sept 2003, HP has a portfolio of 30,000 properties in cities worldwide. |
| Hotels.com |
Part of the Expedia, Inc. group. They claim to be "the Internet's largest specialized provider of discount accommodations worldwide", with savings of up to 70%. Certainly, with a database of over 100,000 hotels worldwide, there's a lot of choice when you get the results back from a search. They say if a customer can find the same deal for less on a prepaid hotel, Hotels.com will match it, and they are not obsessed with online-only sales, you can phone them. |
| HotelsCombined |
Hotel price comparison site that searches more than thirty major travel sites at once, and they now have a nifty iPhone app. |
| HouseTrip |
 European holiday apartment booking website launched in 2009. You can book a whole apartment or villa for the price of a hotel room, the way you would book a hotel, online and with a credit card. Guests pay securely at the time of booking and payment is only transferred to the host when the guests have started their stay. |
| igluVillas.com |
Mediterranean villas specialist website. You can find and book villas online through the usual destination driven criteria, but they also categorise villas for families, villas for golfers, and rather usefully villas with other villas next door - for groups who want to stay close together but not in the same house. The site can also find nearby activities for particular villas, a spin-off function from the now closed igluActive website which instead of selling 'activity holidays' sold villas that happened to have canoeing or mountain-climbing, etc opportunities nearby. |
| Luxury Explorer |
Launched in July 05, they call themselves a "luxury travel portal" offering a portfolio of over 100 of "the world's finest independent luxury hotel and resorts". The website is stylish and simple to use, which is always a good sign. |
| Med Hotels |
Med Hotels was formed by two former Virgin travel executives who saw an increasing trend towards customers preferring to book hotels separately as opposed to as part of a package. It has over 1500 x 3, 4 and 5-star resort hotels, villas or apartments around the Mediterranean and is aimed at both travel agents or independent travellers. |
| NeedaHotel.com |
Irish hotel accommodation site offering hotels in capital cities worldwide, using Octopus.com (see below) as an engine. |
| Octopus Travel |
Hotels and Sightseeing Tours Worldwide. The database has 19,000 discounted hotels and 2,000 apartments in 3,300 cities and towns in 112 countries worldwide, plus 1000 sightseeing tours and excursions to enjoy during your stay. Clean simple to use and speedy site. |
| One Off Places |
One Off Places is a bit of a cross breed. On the face of it, it looks like a self-catering specialist with rentable apartments, villas, cabins, tents, wagons, houseboats, windmills and treehouses, but it also features B&B stays in Moroccan riads, French Chateaux and castles in Scotland. The common thread is that they are all individual, distinctive and ‘one-off’ style properties. |
| ParisHotels.com |
Online booking for 180 "charming" hotels in Paris. |
| PetitMonde |
Discounted luxury hotel accommodation in the UK and worldwide. |
| PlacesToStay.com |
Online worldwide hotel reservations system based in Ireland selling hotels in over 5,000 destinations in 160 countries worldwide. Simple and effective to use, and with a telephone help desk. It's gone through a few changes since it started out in March 1999 as iRd-net.com. In June 2000 it took on the snappier identity of ClickandGoNow.com, which then became the less snappy, cnghotels.com! |
| PV-Holidays |
Longstanding French accommodation specialist, Pierre Vacances, offering a huge range of apartments, chalets, holiday villages, hotels, and other accommodation in France (mostly), Spain and Italy. |
| RoomAuction.com |
Online auction service enabling customers to bid for and book rooms at hotels in popular locations such as the Lake District, Cotswolds, Cornwall and London for less than the standard rate. The site shows the standard rate for different types of rooms at featured hotels, and the customer offers the lower price they’re willing to pay and can 'haggle' with the hotelier. They have (April 05) more than 80 hotels signed up on an annual membership basis, with four to five new ones joining every week. |
| Roomorama |
Launched in Jan 2009, Roomorama is an online rental community and one-stop shop for short-term rentals with private owners of flats and houses. |
| SelfCateringHols.com |
Online villa agency with properties in over 20 countries worldwide. |
| Skoosh.com |
Hotel booking site based on consumer reviews (2 bad reviews and they're dumped) with the moderate sized portfolio of properties concentrated in Europe and some in North America (mostly Canada). |
| Smoothhound |
Utilitarian simple-to-use website (like us) offering thousands of hotels, guest houses & B&Bs in the UK. |
| Snowbeds.com |
Accommodation only website for catered & self-catering ski chalets. Online catalogue of over 1300 self-catered and privately operated catered chalets and apartments in France, Switzerland, Italy and Austria |
| somewhere2stay.com |
Owned & operated by Cosmos Holidays. No frills holiday accommodation at low prices to the most popular leisure destinations in Europe. The database has approximately 2,000 hotels and apartments in the 3-5 star category in 30+ destinations. |
| Sunhotels.net |
Simple to use online booking agency from Scandinavia which was launched in the UK in Dec 03. All prices are in Euros. |
| Superbreak.com |
Online hotel directory for over 1,800 x 2-5 star hotels in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (including over 200 in London). You can search for airports hotels and make Theatrebreak bookings. In 2001 they added 800 hotels in European cities. |
| Topixi |
Nice clean, simple-to-use, hotel site with destination and property details, guest reviews, photos, maps and room availability on over 150,000 properties in almost 15,000 cities across the globe. |
| Totalstay.com |
Claims to have discounted prices at up to 70% off normal rates at 15,000 hotels worldwide (both independent and international chains) in 3,000 cities. It has a nice simple design that works intuitively |
| Travel Intelligence |
Formerly a travel publishing website with a pool of 120+ professional travel writers, some of them like co-founder AA Gill quite well-known, writing hotel reviews and travel features. From October 04 it will become an online hotel booking agency, specialising in "individual atmospheric hotels of character". How it is going to continue publishing 'independent' articles reviewing hotels that it is selling, we are not quite sure.... wait and see! |
| TravHotels.com |
Simple to use hotel booking site covering most of the major city destinations worldwide. Online manifestation of Eurobookers, sister company to Eurobookers. |
| Unusual Hotels of the World |
A 'collection' of 120 bizarre and unusual places to stay around the world including treehouses, underwater lodges, caves, igloo’s and ice hotels, which you can book online. |
| Venere.com |
Hotel reservations site with an Italian flavour. Venere was launched by four young Italians in 1995 and grew to the point at which it was bought by Expedia in 2008. They now offer over 100,000 properties around the world and have been hosting independent guest reviews since 2001, slightly ahead of the pack. |
| VillaRenters.com |
Online villa agency with over 6,000 properties in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Florida & other countries, but especially Mallorca & Tuscany. |
| VillaSeek.com |
Searcheable database of villas worldwide run by the publishers of Holiday Villas Magazine. Like most 'shop-window' site, bookings are made directly with the owners. |
| wotif.com |
Excellent marketplace website for hoteliers to dump their last minute 'distressed stock'. If you need a room in the next 14 days in pretty much any major city/country you care to name, you'll find plenty of tempting offers here, and what's more it's a really intuitive & simple website to use. Wotif is an Australian company founded in 2000, and expanding fast with offices around the world. Its portfolio includes over 6000 hotels, motels, apartments, resorts, guesthouses and bed & breakfasts in 32 countries. |
| Zleeping Hotels |
Selling over 30,000 hotels at more than 1500 destinations in over 120 countries. Focused on social media users with rewards for reviews. |
