These are online accommodation agents, or directories and 'collections' specialising in hotel booking, villa, apartment and holiday home lettings. |
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| All-Hotels.com |
Booking site for over 100,000 hotels worldwide, and now offers a 'hotels + flights' booking system. Also cover B&Bs. Was aquired by Online Travel Corporation (OTC) in Sept 2002, so now consolidated into the Lastminute Group. |
| Apartments Abroad |
16,000 properties in and around beach resorts in 50 countries. Unusually, when you book, the contract is between you and Apartments Abroad, so technically they are an operator not an agent. |
| Cheapnights.com |
Spin-off from its parent, cheapflights.com. Originally launched in April 2001 as a directory of hotel companies. Now it has been redesigned and relaunched as a bargain-led site featuring offers from a range of hotel chains and single properties. |
| ContempoHotels.com |
Chic new (Feb 06) hotel breaks brand from Elegant Resorts, matching clients with glamorous urban and resort hotels, plus flights & transfers. Easy to use, you start searching by picking a 'vibe' - Chic Hotels, Urban Hotels, Chill Hotels or Cool Hotels. |
| Design Hotels |
German-based directory and reservations site specialising in designer hotels worldwide. Lots of stylish pics and trendy graphics. |
| diytravel.co.uk |
Launched Jan 06 offering 15,000 competitively priced hotels in the destinations most visited by British travellers, reviewed and rated by a "do it yourself" travel community of 30,000 members from the owner, Ben Jackson's former review site Holidays-Exposed.com. |
| 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. Unlike most directories it is free from the bane of adverts, so like Travel-Lists it navigates really quickly. |
| Epoque Hotels |
Stylish collection of 200+ boutique hotels worldwide with simple online realtime booking & confirmation. |
| GayRes.com |
Accommodation agency specialising in the gay market. |
| HolidayHotels.com |
Part of Lastminute.com. Accommodation-only site offering hotels and apartments at resorts and cities throughout Europe and America |
| HolidayLeaders.com |
Villa rentals and self catering holiday accommodation world wide. Easy to use site with plenty of enticing properties. |
| HolidayLets.net |
Online source for villas throughout Europe and in Florida. |
| Holiday-Rentals |
One of the original property rental sites, it now (Oct 04) has almost 9,000 villas, cottages and apartments, in the UK, Europe & worldwide, which you can book direct with the owners. |
| HolidaysRental |
Dutch operated site offering a wide selection of properties throughout Europe. |
| Hotel America |
Hotel America has been offering a web based and telephone reservations service offering more than 1,000 hotels in North America since 1996. This is the parent site that spawned Hotel Anywhere (below). |
| 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). |
| HotelConnect |
Discount prices on hotels in 85 European cities. |
| 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. |
| Hotel Net |
Accommodation-only search & reservations engine for 40,000 hotels throughout Europe, USA, Canada & South Africa. It used to act as an agency for a handful of clients (eg Johansons, Choice, Minôtel, Relais & Chateaux), but in 2000 it became part of the Holidaybreak group and has expanded its range. |
| 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. |
| HotelRoomsandVillas |
Accommodation-only website launched (2005) by Olympic Holidays, in conjunction with sister longhaul specialist, Odyssey Worldwide. It features over 1,000 hotels and self-catering options. Although it describes itself as 'accommodation-only', charter flights to all destinations from up to 18 UK airports can also be booked onsite. |
| Hotels.com |
They claim to be "the Internet's largest specialized provider of discount accommodations worldwide", with savings of up to 70%. Certainly there's a lot of choice when you get the results back from a search. |
| 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. |
| IntoMountains.com |
Ski villas, apartments & hotels in Canada, USA, France, Switzerland and Italy. Not a holiday company, just a property agency. |
| 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. |
| MyVillaRenters.com |
Online villa agency with over 6,000 properties in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Florida & other countries, but especially Mallorca & Tuscany. The Rutland-based company has (April 05) has been voted the internet’s Best Travel Website in a survey by Web User Magazine largely for its user-friendly instant booking system. |
| 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. |
| OnlineHotelsDirect.com |
Specialist hotel reservations at discounted rates for 9,000 UK hotels, European hotels and hotels worldwide. Properties range from 2-star to 5-star, from country inns, bed and breakfasts, city centre hotels to country houses. |
| 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! |
| 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. |
| 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 |
| Snow Mango |
Online ski accommodation in Italy, France, Austria and Switzerland. |
| 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.
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| 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. |
| TopRoomsOnline.com |
Simple to use online reservations for hotels in the UK. |
| 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. |
| USArooms |
Hotel rooms in all major US cities. A part of the Complete Travel Group |
| Villa Centre |
A portfolio of around 60+ villas with private pools in France, Spain, and Italy.
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| villaclick.com |
villaclick.com is an online villa holiday site offering over 1500 villas and apartments in Spain, Portugal and Florida. Searching for a villa is quick and efficient. They offer flexible durations at many properties, eg 10, 13 or 17 night stays rather than the usual 7 or 14 nights. This allows people to take advantage of cheaper mid-week flights through the low-cost airlines. You can book online or by phone. |
| Villadeals.com |
When they launched Villadeals called themselves the first Internet No Frills
self-catering accommodation site. Basically they sell distressed stock for villa operators and owners, although they put it more delicately.. "even the most popular villa has a few weeks in a season with no bookings. Rather than leave the villa empty and get no cash for it - we would rather rent the odd week for next to nothing and keep everyone happy". Part of TUI-UK, the group that own Thomsons, they have villas & apartments in Corsica, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain & Turkey. |
| 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. |
| Villaspain.com |
Search and book villas and apartments between Denia and Altea on the Costs Blanca, Spain. |
| VoyageNow.com |
Simple to use reservations system for 15,000 discounted hotels in 112 countries. Also offers local tours to go with your hotel room. |
| WorldBy.com |
The parent site for a set of accommodation catalogue sites featuring selected hotels and rental properties that can be researched and booked online. Current sites include ItalyBy.com, RomeBy.com, FlorenceBy.com, VeniceBy.com, ParisBy.com, RivieraBy.com, LondonBy.com, AmsterdamBy.com, ScotlandBy.com and Tuscany.net |
| 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. |
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