Website review: EasyToBook.com

Author: Matt Preston Become a contributor

There’s a whole bunch of hotel price comparison websites out there. A quick Google search can bring up a bewildering amount, so many in fact that most people find one they like and tend to stick with it. So much choice can breed loyalty it seems and the user experience is everything. I was recently contacted by one online hotel reservations site with a promising name, easytobook.com. I was asked to review their services and give an unbiased and honest account of my experiences. I’d personally not heard of the site before and with a name like “Easy to book” I wondered if it really would be.

The Homepage

The homepage is clean and well organised and while it might not be a ground breaking design it’s easy to navigate which is always important. There’s some clear calls to action here, a nice big search facility and some useful popular destinations if you’re looking for inspiration. As the company is based in Amsterdam there’s a lean towards hotels and points of interest there. This can be confusing if you didn’t know that but there’s enough stats on the homepage to let you know they have hundreds of hotels all over the world. 112,830 when I first visited.

Searching for hotels

First I thought I’d search for somewhere fairly popular but not on their popular destinations list. A search for “Cork” (in Ireland) showed me suggestions for the city, the airport and a list of hotels. As I don’t know where I want to stay i went with the first option and set my birthday (in June in case you wondered) as my check in date.

The results page is nicely organised with clear filtering options and an impressive listing system for the hotels. I especially like the “show map” option at the top which is very intuitive and begs to be clicked on with a thin bar of map visible. Room types are clearly listed and I like knowing how many rooms are available without having to navigate to each hotel. Any less than 6 rooms and it’ll be labelled in red. The prices are big and there’s also an impressive selection of currencies available, defaulting to whatever country you’re currently in. Personally I’d like the ability to remove or at least collapse the details of hotels I’m not interested in. Scrolling through a long page of information I may not care about can get a bit tedious. Most booking engines offer filters for your search but i’ve yet to see many that offer customised display of results.

The compare feature does help with this by letting you quickly and easily compare rooms across multiple hotels without leaving the page. You get prices, what’s included, a whole tonne of other expandable information and handy google maps showing how far each hotel is from the city centre. Very clever!

Clicking on a hotel’s details page gives you a fairly standard layout of information and helps you to book quickly if you’re in a rush. The gallery view is a nice popup window although as with most booking sites the images are uploaded by the hotels themselves and are never high enough quality or size.

Comparing prices with competitors

A quick look around on their competitors websites showed the prices and offers matched. No surprises really as the information is updated by the hotels. Also easytobook.com offer a price guarantee if you can find a lower price elsewhere. In my experience prices are usually the same on most booking sites (depending on how they take their commission) so you it’s more about the user experience than the price.

Checking out

When you click to book a hotel the design changes somewhat. A cut down version of the site with just your payment progress for navigation. This is quite refreshing compared to a lot of sites where the payment process can seem daunting with too many links and buttons surrounding what you really need to do, pay!

All the information here is clearly laid out and also informs you the currency (and local cost) you’ll be paying in when you check-out of your hotel. For instance I chose to view the price in GBP but as Ireland’s currency is Euros it shows me the price in both currencies. You can also leave any comments you’d like passed on to the hotel which is handy if you’re arriving late or need assistance on arrival.

Some unusual searches

I always like to test sites like this with some unusual locations around the world that it may have trouble with. Firstly Fortaleza in Brazil. Easytobook found 30 hotels ranging from 2 to 5 stars and even featured an introduction to the city (named by the Portuguese in 1654 apparently). San Carlos De Bariloche in Argentina was no problem either. I tried the city of Lijiang in China and found 8 hotels. Lastly I tried quiet welsh town and while the pretty coastal town of Tenby returned 3 results there was surprisingly no availability in June. Still not bad and the extra information on each town or region was an interesting feature.

Conclusion

I can report that the booking experience was indeed easy to book, a name they’ll have to make sure they live up to. While i’m not a huge fan of orange the site is very tidy and the site is intuitive to use. While what they’re offering isn’t ground breaking and certainly not the highest number of hotels of all the online hotel booking sites, what they do is make it easy to find what you’re after with enough good features to make it, as they say, easy to book.

More information

• Visit their website at www.easytobook.com
• Follow them on twitter at @easytobook
• Book over the phone at +31-20-5313300
• Read their blog

This review was sponsored by easytobook.com. If you would like us to review your website or product you can find out more here.