Hotel scrapers - one to avoid like the plague

Whilst scratching around the travel section on the Guardian today I was a bit less amused than usual as I'd had the leisure this weekend to skim read the paper from cover to cover. Normally, at best I'd end up throwing it out a couple of weeks later, unread.

Anyway I normally use Trivago so scrape through different websites for good deals, but decided to have a nose at hotelsupermarket. Now I would have thought it would be a good site. But a quick snoop through "Budapest, Hungary" actually threw up loads of entries for Bodum, Turkey, and not all of them obvious. AVOID unless you want to find you've booked yourself into a hotel 1000 kms and 2 countries away.

I have also had trouble in the past with Netflights. For a start the site doesn't work with Firefox, you have to use Internet Explorer or find yourself unable to book anything. Secondly, the rates advertised for the two weeks I wanted in LAX in April were a good bit higher than the deal I got through Angus Rent a Car's CarTrawler system. And most annoyingly, not only did they not send me through a voucher for my hotel, but took a couple of days of phoning to get through and when they did send it, it looked very unprofessional - some hotels might not have accepted it. Again, one to avoid.

Skyscanner looks interesting. Skyscanner basically does what Ryanair doesn't do - matches up your cheap connecting flight to a cheap charter rather than finding yourself unable to get to some locations, notably classic resorts mainly serviced by package operators, except via horrendously expensive flights via mainstream operators.

You would understand Ryanair's unease about this kind of competition if they were losing business because of it, but intriguingly, they are probably gaining from this piggyback websites. For example, I know somebody who routinely travels the Belfast to Las Palmas route, but finds it really difficult to get a fairly priced direct deal. So she books separate connecting flights, usually entirely separately, and probably pays handsomely. So Skyscanner is the answer - pulling together the charters and the cheapies.

I think a good part of the problem is that Ryanair's site, once considered very novel, is now creaking and out of date compared to other operators, who now offer a far more sophisticated level of services via their websites. I suspect that a good overhaul would do Ryanair far more good than harm.

Note this post was updated thanks to more detailed information passed to me by Skyscanner below (1st Jul 09)