Top Hotel Scams

Here's some top 3 ways hotels will try and save/make money on you:

Laundry

Never do laundry in amounts through the hotel laundry, it will cost you an arm and a leg. The odd shirt or T-shirt, pair of pumps or whatever, save the rest for the launderrette.

Often hotels are reluctant to tell you where the nearest launderrette is or flatly refuse. This is because they make so much money on the people who pay $2 to wash a pair of socks.

Avoid.

 

Mini-bar

One way hotels save money it take the cooling elements OUT of the minibar, turn the fridge elements off, or just leave the lights working to save them that extra cash. You may have noticed this when you grab a nice warm beer or that tepid bottle of water.

It's not a weird co-incidence, hotels will do this on purpose. All very well, but when you're paying 5 stars, you expect the fridge to work and the drinks to be cold.

Sad little hotel scam.

 

Internet

This has got to be the biggest scam of the lot.

How much does it cost to connect to the Internet at home, $20-30 a month for unlimited connection?

Unless you're connecting from Tibuktoo through satellite uplink, you're getting that identical connection, multiplying that by say 10 guests paying $20 per day, that's $6,000 per month for that same connection.

Big money for the hotels, rip off for the common consumer.

Budget flights - new season - new search engine

Part of my job for the site that sponsors this blog lonelyplanetexchange.com is a routine shuffling of the site's accommodations and flights databases.

Twice a year, May and November, two of the databases on which the site rests are removed along with all the information about easyjet flights or cheap hotels in Amsterdam and thrown in the bin.

Not like a genocide, more a general purge of all the nasty old stuff from yester-month replaced by new business and new flight routes.

A lot of the sites I've been on today I've noticed how shabby their systems are.
In a number of cases, operators display flights which don't exist to make their search forms look busy.

Here's a list of the search engines in the UK budget flights market and how they rank.

:) Nice
1 - Ryanair - Fast, fresh data with pop-up warnings initially alarming but at the same time helpfull.
2 - Easyjet - More aesthetically pleasing than Ryan also displays departure days making it easier to get the cheaper flights.
3 - Thomson - Copes well considering the level of seasonal fluctuation. During the UK summer Thomsonfly is the UK's largest operator by routes.

:( Nasty
1 - Air Baltic - Clunky and green with high prices. Baltic whisks you off to affiliate sites quicker than you can say 'gulag'.
2 - BMI baby - Another browser hijacker. Pick a flight; next thing the browser is doing the walking for you.
3 - Fly Thomas Cook - A site where the homepage is located in the script repository.
Most of the routes are in action but a large minority (40%) are just there to make it look good.
I'm pretty sure Thomas Cook don't have one individual, designer or manager, with responsibility for this site because it's a mess.

A quick word from our sponsors
Given my experiences, I can look and say that by using budget flight search engines like lonelyplanetexchange or skyscanner, you're removing an element of hit and miss and getting a selection of the cheapest flights from a variety of sources.
That's got to be the way forward.