Hotellook vs Booking.com: How to Choose in 2026

Booking.com is an online travel agency. It signs contracts with hotels, takes inventory, and charges its own commission — typically 15 to 25 percent of the room rate. When you book, you are transacting directly with Booking.com, which then forwards the reservation to the property. The platform carries roughly 28 million listings across hotels, apartments, and guesthouses worldwide.

Hotellook is a metasearch engine, closer in structure to Google Hotels or Kayak. It does not hold inventory. Instead, it queries partner OTAs — Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Agoda, and around 70 others — and displays their prices side by side. Clicking a result takes you off Hotellook and onto the partner site to complete the transaction. Hotellook earns a referral fee from that partner, not from the hotel.

The distinction matters because metasearch engines surface price competition that a single OTA cannot show you. On the other hand, they depend entirely on their data-feed partners being up to date, which is not always guaranteed during high-demand periods or last-minute searches.

Booking.com restructured its affiliate commission tiers in late 2025, reducing base payouts for most partner categories and tightening cookie windows from 30 days to 7 days. The practical effect is that travel publishers who once defaulted to Booking.com links are actively diversifying — sending more traffic toward metasearch tools like Hotellook, which still offers a 30-day attribution window and a split-revenue model that rewards volume differently.

For travelers, this shift has a tangible consequence: editorial content that once surfaced Booking.com deals almost exclusively is now more likely to feature Hotellook comparisons, Expedia rates, or Agoda pricing for Southeast Asia. The underlying hotel prices have not changed, but the path a reader takes to find them has. Being aware of that dynamic helps you read recommendations with appropriate skepticism.

Flight aggregators are experiencing parallel disruption. Aviasales, for instance, has expanded its hotel-comparison features alongside its core flight search, creating a one-stop tool that competes on both fronts. If you are already searching for flights, checking Aviasales for hotel rates on the same search session can occasionally surface inventory Hotellook misses.

Hotellook earns its keep in three specific scenarios. The first is a leisure trip to a city with dense hotel supply — think Bangkok's Sukhumvit corridor, Lisbon's Baixa district, or Midtown Manhattan. With 50-plus OTAs competing for the same rooms, price gaps between platforms can reach 18 to 22 percent on a four-night stay. Hotellook surfaces all of those gaps in a single view, something no single OTA can do.

The second scenario is currency arbitrage. Agoda, for example, frequently prices Southeast Asian hotels in Thai baht or Indonesian rupiah at a lower effective rate than Booking.com prices in USD. Hotellook's comparison table makes this visible instantly. On a week-long stay in Chiang Mai or Seminyak, booking through the cheaper-currency feed can save $30 to $60 without any change to the room you receive.

The third scenario is loyalty-agnostic travel. If you are not collecting Booking.com Genius points or Expedia One Key rewards, there is no reason to pay a premium for a branded OTA. Hotellook routes you to whichever platform is cheapest for that specific room on that specific date, which is the rational move for travelers who do not have a points strategy.

Booking.com's Genius loyalty program becomes genuinely valuable at tier 2 and tier 3, which require 10 and 15 completed stays respectively. Tier 2 unlocks free breakfast at participating properties and room upgrades — benefits that can represent $25 to $40 of value per night at a mid-range city hotel. If you are close to a tier threshold, the math often favors booking through Booking.com even when Hotellook shows a slightly cheaper rate elsewhere.

Customer service is a second differentiator. Booking.com operates 24-hour support in 43 languages and has a relatively straightforward dispute process for overbookings. When you book through a Hotellook-linked OTA you have never used, you inherit that OTA's support infrastructure — which varies widely. For high-stakes trips like destination weddings, conference travel, or non-refundable international itineraries, the known quantity matters.

Booking.com also tends to have stronger last-minute availability. Hotels allocate a portion of their distressed inventory — unsold rooms within 24 to 48 hours of check-in — directly to Booking.com before it reaches third-party feeds. If you are booking same-day in a sold-out market, Booking.com's direct relationships with properties give it a meaningful edge over metasearch tools that rely on feed updates.

Booking.com displays taxes and fees before checkout on most listings, though resort fees at US properties are still frequently disclosed only at the final payment screen. Hotellook's transparency depends entirely on the partner OTA completing the sale. Some partners — notably Expedia and Hotels.com — show total prices including taxes by default. Others surface the base rate in the comparison view and add fees at checkout, which can make Hotellook's displayed prices look cheaper than they ultimately are.

A practical workaround: when Hotellook shows a rate that looks significantly better than Booking.com, click through to the partner OTA and reach the final payment screen before concluding you have found a deal. Add up taxes, service charges, and any mandatory resort fees. In markets like Las Vegas, Orlando, and Miami Beach, resort fees of $35 to $55 per night can reverse a $20-per-night apparent saving entirely.

For travelers browsing short-term rental options alongside hotels, the same fee-stacking problem applies. Our guide to short-term stays on Sojourn House covers how to read total-cost disclosures across platforms before committing to a booking.

Booking.com's mobile app is one of the most polished in the OTA category. Map view, filter behavior, and saved-search functionality are reliable across iOS and Android. The app also stores payment credentials and loyalty status, which compresses the checkout process to two or three taps for repeat users. For quick decisions — say, a same-day hotel in an unfamiliar city — that frictionless experience has real value.

Hotellook's mobile app is functional but less refined. The comparative value it provides is more naturally suited to desktop research, where you can open multiple tabs, copy-paste confirmation numbers, and verify fee structures across platforms. On mobile, the redirect experience — leaving Hotellook and landing in a third-party OTA app or mobile site — adds steps and occasionally breaks session continuity.

A sensible workflow for most leisure travelers: use Hotellook on desktop to identify the cheapest platform for your specific hotel, then complete the booking directly in that platform's own app or website for a smoother checkout. This hybrid approach captures the price-comparison benefit of metasearch without sacrificing the UX quality of a mature OTA interface. If you plan to be navigating in a new country without a local SIM, picking up an Airalo eSIM data plan before departure keeps your comparison-shopping seamless from any device.

Use Hotellook when you are booking leisure travel at least five days in advance, you have flexibility on which OTA completes the sale, and you are not working toward a loyalty tier. It is also the right starting point for international trips where currency-feed arbitrage is plausible — particularly Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Run the comparison, click through to the cheapest feed, and verify total cost before checking out.

Use Booking.com when you are booking within 48 hours of arrival, you are a Genius tier 2 or tier 3 member, the trip carries high stakes that make customer-service quality important, or you simply want one trusted interface with stored payment details. The platform's direct inventory relationships and support infrastructure justify paying a modest premium in those circumstances.

Neither tool is universally superior. The travelers who get the best rates are the ones who understand what each platform is actually doing — and switch between them based on the trip at hand. For broader planning, explore Sojourn House' travel essentials resources alongside our curated hotel listings to build a search workflow that fits how you actually travel.