In this particular instance I am referring to sites like Agoda, Air BnB, TripAdvisor, Booking, the list goes on and on.
I have traveled all over the world and while I will admit that it is significantly easier to book with one of these huge sites I want people to understand that these companies are actually ruining a big portion of the travel industry and unless we the users react accordingly, they will succeed at controlling and eventually shutting down smaller businesses.
src
Despite the image, I am not picking on one particular company here. They all have benefits to using them that cannot be accomplished easily using other means. I am suggesting that you use their tools in order to find what you are looking for and then see if you can find a way to contact the hotel / hostel / guesthouse directly and book that way.
When I was traveling the world I would meet many guesthouse owners and one common theme would emerge... that they absolutely loathed that these booking sites had taken over the industry.
When you use any of these sites sure, it is convenient, but they take 15 to 25 percent of the overall booking from the property owners and at least in the hostel industry, this is often their entire profit margin.
As a long-term traveler, I am very interested in supporting the little guys because these are normally mom and pop operations that barely make any money. When we start involving 3rd party booking sites we are putting 20% of all lodging profits into the pockets of massive corporations and helping the CEO's to get a second private jet. I don't want to help out with that.
src
These smaller places with family owners are the same people that are going to bend over backwards to help you out with real information about the local area, treat you like family, and make you feel extremely welcome and it would be a damn shame if they were to disappear from the marketplace. Covid hasn't helped with this process of course and many of them are seriously struggling right now. The last thing we want to do is make it even more difficult for them
So here is what I suggest because I recognize that the 3rd party websites, particularly the ones with maps that show the approximate location of various hostels.
- Find the one you want
- make note of the price offered by Agoda / Booking / etc
- contact the business directly and offer them that price for the same room and specify your dates
In my experience, everyone has been more than willing to offer me the same rate that was posted online at 3rd party websites and more often than not, they will even offer a LOWER price because they are very aware of the fact that you are saving them 20% by booking directly. They will also be extremely appreciative that you helped their business by NOT using the booking sites.
The only thing that could go wrong would be if they don't have some sort of online presence but these days just about everyone has at least a FB page.
What I consider to be true backpacking has been slowly but surely disappearing from the world and this is largely driven by tech giants. The small, friendly boutique operations simply cannot compete with larger conglomerates in this environment and we need to do everything that we possibly can in order to preserve this very crucial and amazing aspect of travel.