Booking.com

We travel quite often and use booking.com and venere.com for almost all our reservations. Booking tends to have more properties while venere often has smaller, B&B-type locations. I like both because of their comment and rating policy: You can only post IF you reserved through them AND stayed at the accommodation; so far less ballot stuffing and inflated ratings as you might see on other travel sites/boards. Even with a "reservation" from these two trusted booking agents, I still email my accommodations to VERIFY that I indeed, do have a reservation. I staple the email reply I get from the hotel or B&B to my booking or venere reservation and this serves as my "insurance." It great to have an email with someone's name who is working at the hotel! As a result, I ALWAYS get my rooms - and often get upgrades (especially if you start an email dialogue). There are a few places we stay that neither booking.com or venere.com lists - and this will happen. But these are smaller, specialized locations and in this day of internet booking, these are the exception. Booking.com, for example offers 350+ locations near the Roma Termini station. I'd say that's more than enough options. They do offer many of the same properties - and sometimes at different prices. So on the larger, more popular properties, I'll often check both. Some locations use these agents as "low-cost" options to fill last-minute bookings (without having to constantly update THEIR website). So you can get some deals. I find myself booking less and less on the "hotel websites" because I can see far more options using these agents. There are SO many options that I built some top-20 or top-30 lists (and try to update every few weeks). Daily, more and more properties are being added to each of these vendors. I think you're fine to use them - but I'd still verify with an email.

i agree with ron

Thank you both Soooooooo much. I will email the hotel just to be sure! I'm staying at the Hotel Alimandi Tunisi, where I've stayed several times before -- but this time I got a much better rate on Booking than I did on their website, and it worried me!

Donna, I agree with Ron. Last year I made over 20 reservations with booking.com and only two resulted in an unsatisfactory experience: one hotel was oversold, but walked me to a sister property that was much nicer (but at the booking.com rate); another hotel room was unacceptable, and I was also walked to a sister property. I like Ron's idea of starting an email correspondence - I didn't right away, but after the first hotel could not accommodate me, I sent emails or phoned ahead to confirm arrival dates/times. Nothing bad to say about booking.com. Of those 20+ reservations, only one hotel charged my credit card prior to my arrival.