A Little Aprehensive ....

[rinakim]

Saw a commercial for a website called Trivago, checked it out yesterday.
Found Cocolapalm for $59 a night for a Deluxe Room for our dates in November/December with Booking.com ........ booked it. How can you beat that price???
Today I look again (I'm crazy that way) and it is $45 a night for the same room. Is this legit?
Has anyone successfully used this combination of websites before?

Now if only I could find that kind of deal on airfare .........

[MoFromMonroe]

Wow that is a great price. I would email Coco in a few days to see if they have your reservation. If they do you know you got a great deal having been there before. Nice!!!!

That is funny that you already looked again the next day. I never look at the airfare or the room price after I book it.

[jon c.]

I always keep looking at the prices after I make a reservation. It's a compulsion.

That site does have some nice rates, although I noted that when I went to actually make a reservation, the price increased with some of the properties.

[pwj155]

looks like a great deal,please keep us informed. I did find a problem(not with coco but with some others)that when you selected a hotel(rockhouse and a few others)you are directed to a lesser hotel. I hope it is legit and please be sure to read and understand every part of what you are buying. good luck and enjoy your trip!

[rinakim]

Wow that is a great price. I would email Coco in a few days to see if they have your reservation. If they do you know you got a great deal having been there before. Nice!!!!

That is funny that you already looked again the next day. I never look at the airfare or the room price after I book it.

Hi Mo, I have a serious problem when it comes to checking prices, I think I may have a touch of OCD.

I always keep looking at the prices after I make a reservation. It's a compulsion.

That site does have some nice rates, although I noted that when I went to actually make a reservation, the price increased with some of the properties.

I noticed the price jump on a few that I checked as well, but the ones that I looked at were still great deals.
I have the same compulsion

looks like a great deal,please keep us informed. I did find a problem(not with coco but with some others)that when you selected a hotel(rockhouse and a few others)you are directed to a lesser hotel. I hope it is legit and please be sure to read and understand every part of what you are buying. good luck and enjoy your trip!

I noticed that too, for example Catcha Falling Star links you to Catcha Gardens, and Rockhouse links you to Alvy(something).
I was a little skeptical about the price and conditions and I read every little bit of fine print that I could, didn't see anything sketchy.

The booking says that Coco will charge my card directly for 2 nights and then the rest is due upon arrival. I will wait a couple of days to see if anything goes through on my card and go from there.

I'll keep you posted.

Time for a new ticker

[Seveen]

it will work out fine for November and December

don't name the baby Negrilla! lol

have fun . . .

[justchuck]

I have used Booking.com before without any problems.

[JandMinJA]

Just a little info for anyone wondering about booking.com... Yes, you can be redirected to other hotels, but once you're on the actual booking page, just pay attention, that IS the hotel you're booking regardless of what hotel you had been looking at up to that point. The first main concern is the taxes and check-in policies. As always, read the fine print and be sure you know what to expect (like additional taxes) when you arrive at the hotel. The other frequent problem you need to be concerned with is whether or not the hotel actually received the reservation. Different 3rd party sites (that's what hoteliers call all the dot com's selling rooms for us) have different contracts with the hotels. Some are allowed to "free sell" which means they can sell as many rooms as the want at a certain rate or within a certain range of rates. Others are given a set number of rooms to sell and once their allocation is gone, they will appear as "sold out" on that site even though the hotel itself is not likely sold out. I'm not sure how it works for hotels out of the country but I can tell you for hotels in the US, we typically receive our reservations from booking.com via fax or email. These are sent to us automatically by booking.com's system, but sometimes the emails or faxes never come - some hiccup along the way and *poof* they're lost in cyberspace. That's when you run the risk of showing up at a hotel that has sold out since you booked your room and never received your reservation leaving you without a place to stay. It happens. Expedia, Hotels.com, and Orbitz work the same way. (FYI, Expedia, Hotels.com, and Booking.com are all the same parent company - Expedia & Hotels.com even run on the exact same contract so it's unlikely you'll find different rates between the two for all you compulsive rate checkers). So, if you're going to book on a 3rd party site, do yourself a favor and call the hotel a day or two after you book (not immediately after because it takes some time for your reservation to get to the actual hotel) to confirm you got the room type you want, you understand all the fees, and that everyone is on the same page. If not, at least you have some time to fix it.

While I'm on my soapbox, let me spill some more industry secrets. Maybe I'll be banned from the US and have no choice but to stay in Negril on my next reach - haha! When you book on these third party sites, you are cutting the hotelier out of a portion of their money. Some sites get 10% commission, others take 20-25%, and others take even more. One of those evil third parties has guests paying them X amount for a room and pays the hotel less than HALF of that amount! AND the taxes they collect are actually taxes "and fees" (fine print) that the third party site keeps. So that tax is not going to the city in which you booked to support tourism and schools and infrastructure repairs and so on. It is being held by the dot com you just booked on. Yes, us hoteliers like to be able to reach folks any way we can, but we would much rather see you book direct with us. It helps us out not only with profitability but it also allows us the opportunity to ensure you get the type of room you want and aren't blindsided with other charges when you arrive. All those little "special request" boxes on the forms you fill out to book a room on the major third parties - those rarely even make it to the hotel. And for those of you bidding on priceline and hotwire... listen closely to the commercials... you are bidding on the hotel's UNSOLD rooms. Let's think about this... a hotel with 15 non smoking singles and 5 smoking singles has sold 18 rooms and is hoping dot com will sell one of those last two rooms. Now, do you think the last 2 rooms are smoking or non-smoking? You get to the hotel and find out your bid won a smoking single and you throw a fit because you put in a request for non-smoking. Guess what? No way to fulfill that request (if the hotel even gets it). Why? Because at the time you bid, the two rooms left were the rooms the hotel COULD NOT SELL - the last two smoking rooms. You demand they change you to a different room. How can they when you bid on the only rooms left on the property? Now, a lot of the time, a hotel has lots of rooms left and getting you in what you want isn't a problem. But sometimes it is. Be prepared for that and remember, "You get what you pay for." Surely you didn't think you were entitled to the best room in the hotel for $30 when the room rate is normally $100 (not saying it's impossible to get a great room, just saying that's not how it always works out.)

One last bit of information, when you book on a lot of those major third parties, the hotel only receives your name. No phone number. No address. No email. Just your name. So if they get a special request for a ground floor room but don't have any, believe me, they wish they could call you and let you know right away. No desk clerk wants to make you unhappy. But when we have no way to reach you, what can we do? Solution: if you're going to book online, ALWAYS call the hotel after and confirm everything so no one has any surprises. Better yet, do your homework online, but book with the hotel direct when you're actually ready to make reservations. The hotelier and staff need your money way worse than the third parties.

Rinakim - I'm sorry for climbing on a soapbox in the middle of your thread but my hope was to give you and others an insight into third parties so your vacation doesn't start badly with wrong (or worse yet non-existent) reservation. That being said, I saw the same amazing deal you saw on booking.com, didn't see any holes in it. I've reached out to that hotel directly twice now to see if they would honor the same rate if I book directly with them (so they don't have to give booking.com a 10-20% commission) and they haven't replied to me. This doesn't help the above argument at all but I can tell you every hotelier in the states that I know would GLADLY match a rate online to have you book direct and in many cases would even beat it. Guess they have to answer the phones and emails first to do that though. Looks like I'll be booking that deal online with you.

BTW, if any of you see someone sitting on the beach in dark glasses, a trench coat, and a fake mustache next month, it's me, they're on to me, and it's only a matter of time before the dot com's make me disappear for the above information.

[tfw73]

I was going to ask if you could directly contact the hotels to see if they would price match...may try that the next time.

[kaycee]

Trivago is legit. Ive used it before. The prices go way down at night and during the morning and afternoons the rates are reasonable.