Review: HotelCalculator.com a Useful Booking Tool

I was recently asked to try out and review HotelCalculator.com. I’ll admit that I had never even heard of this comparison website until approached for this review, but was pleasantly surprised to find a useful, easy-to-use hotel booking site.

What is Hotel Calculator?

HotelCalculator.com does exactly what its name would suggest — it uses search engine technology to compare prices from 28 different hotel reservation sites, and then calculates the best prices. The site can sift through over 100,000 hotels, apartments, hostels and guest houses in 13,000 cities worldwide, and return results in roughly 30 seconds (or less, as was my experience).

Once you check out the listings in your search, you can choose the best deal and navigate to the merchant offering it and book the hotel directly.

The service is available in 12 different languages, and you can calculate costs in 63 different currencies by choosing from a drop-down list in the top right corner on the main page.

Why Use Hotel Calculator?

HotelCalculator is simple, fast, and — best of all — free to use.

Using a comparison site like this one saves you the hassle of having to visit multiple hotel or booking sites in order to find the best deal. It’s a great site for someone like me, who is perhaps a bit lazy when it comes to making hotel reservations.

My Findings

Using the site is simple. The interface on the front page is large and plain, but that’s a positive thing here.

I decided to try a few different searches to try the website out.

Since I’m going to Hawaii in February, I decided to see what hotel prices in Honolulu are like that time of year, even though I’ll be staying with a friend.

I chose to have my results shown in U.S. dollars, then simply typed in the city, my check-in and check-out dates, and specified how many people in how many rooms I would require. Within 10 seconds, I had dozens of results.

The easy-to-navigate results list could be sorted and narrowed in many different ways — by popularity, price, location, star rating, amenities available, guest ratings, etc. Each hotel listing includes a photo of the property, the address, amenities available, and also has a line dedicated to the “best deal,” which tells you which type of room is the cheapest.

Clicking on a hotel listing takes you to a new page. Here, you see what types of rooms are available, and the partner site that has the current deal on offer. Underneath this is a general description of the property and its amenities, a map showing where the hotel is located, as well as a photo gallery and guest ratings.

If you decide a hotel could be a possibility, you can “short list” it and compare prices later.

Just for fun, I compared the price of a high-rated Waikiki hotel on both HotelCalculator and Orbitz.com, and found the prices to be almost identical.

After poking around at my Honolulu results, I decided to do some searches in smaller cities to see the number and quality of results. I first tried Wellington, New Zealand, which returned dozens of results (in fact, double the amount that Orbitz gave me), including both hotels and hostels.

Just to see how broad of a scope HotelCalculator has, I did one last search for a small town in New Zealand — Kaikoura. Not expecting many results, I got four. Not bad. I was pleasantly surprised that any results at all were returned in a small city.

What I Liked

I liked how easy and fast the site was to use. And how CLEAN everything looks. It’s not cluttered with ads or extraneous links, and is really quite pleasing to look at.

I especially liked that, on the results page, you can choose to see the prices of each hotel per night, or the total price of your entire stay. This struck me as helpful, because choosing to see the “price per stay” would save you from adding each night up, and would give you an instant estimate of how much your stay would cost. (A plus for lazy-me.)

And I liked that it seemed possible to find hotel results not just in large, popular cities, but in smaller ones, as well.

What I Didn’t Like

I imagine that if you searched for a hotel in a truly tiny town in the middle of nowhere, you might get few results. Every site — especially a new one — is going to have that limitation, though.

The only thing I really didn’t like about HotelCalculator was that the listings don’t include guest reviews. They include guest ratings, but very few of the hotels I looked at had even been rated — probably due to this being a relatively new site.

I’m the type of person who likes to read customer reviews of products and services before I shell out money for them, but, in order to read reviews of any of the hotels listed on HotelCalculator, you have to go to the partner site offering the deal and look for reviews there. It only takes one extra step, though, so it’s really not too much of an inconvenience.

iPhone App

HotelCalculator also has an iPhone app that allows you to search for accommodation closest to your current location. I don’t have an iPhone, and so was unable to test it out. But, they call this app “very iPhone friendly,” and I imagine it could be useful while on the road.

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Disclaimer: This review was sponsored by HotelCalculator.com. I was compensated for trying out the site and reviewing it, though I was not required to include or exclude anything, or take any specific stance. The views and opinions in this review are completely my own, because you can’t buy those off me, no matter how much you pay me.

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