Trivago is literally everywhere, nowhere is safe from the travel site that compares and shows you a variety of prices on different booking sites for a number of hotels across the world.
If you are YouTube, the Trivago guy will pop up as an annoying ad in the middle of the video, TV yes sure he is there too. Practically every visual medium, there is a 90% chance that you will see the Trivago ad at least once.
But, being a frequent traveller and having too many options, I have gone through practically every travel site and booking site that is there online.
However, Trivago is perhaps the only one with an extremely fierce marketing plan such that the tag line, ‘Kya Aapne Kabhi Online Hotel Search Kiya Hai?’ (Have you ever searched for a hotel online?) is embedded in our conscious now.
The Indian Trivago guy, Abhinav Kumar, Trivago’s country development head for India, has become a star in the country along with the butt of various jokes, memes and more.
But, after experiencing all the travel sites, I believe I can say that Trivago seems to be mainly just viral marketing and not really have that much substance in it.
Booking.Com Is Better
While booking for a 3 day trip to Amritsar, we scoured through several online travel sites including the big names in India.
Trivago was one of the first choices but after spending over 3 hours on the site, we could not reach anywhere.
The site was not user-friendly, even after multiple filters many of the results did not have adequate photos of the hotel, and the reviews seemed a bit shady.
On the other hand, would have to say that Booking.com was a much easier site to use, it showed better discounts, had more images, even the information about the hotel and the type of rooms it had was much better than the former site.
From personal experience, Booking.com is a great site to use to get all the information you need about a particular hotel, their rooms, the services they offer and much better discounts and slashed prices all in one place (and no this is not a sponsored article, neither do I secretly work for Booking.com).
Tripadvisor though, is a good site to use to get the actual reality of a hotel as you can see a lot of honest reviews there with real-time photographs attached instead of the professionally done and edited ones that the hotel itself uploads.
Ultimately though, we did not really use any site to book the rooms and directly contacted the hotel and asked them if that particular discount that we found on Booking was available. We not only booked but also did not have to pay in advance for the booking and got complimentary breakfast.
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Doesn’t Really Show The Lowest
Another example that an acquaintance shared recently was more of an international kind where they were looking for hotel reservations in New York.
Being an overly cautious person, they checked out a bunch of different sites in order to make sure they got the lowest price possible.
But as per them, Trivago was their first choice because of the relentless ads that they would see practically everywhere.
So while booking a room at the Sheraton in New York, they kept a bunch of tabs open that included Trivago at one side, the official Sheraton side on another and a general Google search on the 3rd.
However, instead of Trivago, it was Google that showed them the lowest price on a site called Hotels.com.
Then to confirm that this was truly the lowest price online, my acquaintance again went to Sheraton site, Bookings.com and rechecked Trivago to make sure they didn’t miss anything.
However, clearly, the rate on Hotels.com had the lowest base rate with the maximum benefits offered and it was truly a disappointment by Trivago.
Considering the fact that it’s a comparison site and one that is marketed so heavily that literally every person, even those who don’t really travel that much, know of Trivago, surely it should have shown the best rate, yet it did not.
Perhaps it’s time that Trivago spends less time on such viral marketing and more time on their algorithms and site system to make sure that the people that do come to their site are not left dissatisfied.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Forbes, Skift, Adage India
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