Book Las Vegas Airline and Hotel Reservations Direct

The Big 3 travel websites are Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity. The Big 2 discounters are Hotwire and Priceline. Many people use these services because of guarantees, advertising, and history of discounting after 9/11/01 when the packages they offered were ACTUALLY cheaper than the hotels and airlines themselves.

VegasMadeEasy.com has been spot testing the travel websites for about 11 months and do not recommend any of them. Over the past few years, hotels in Las Vegas have become more aggressive about cutting out the middle man—the travel websites. Most Vegas hotels guarantee to match or beat prices for their own rooms (with some exceptions). See partial list below.

Boyd Gaming owns the Coast casinos that have reservations and policies separate from their Downtown properties. The 2 largest hotel families in Vegas have an extra 10% guarantee while Palazzo/Venetian will upgrade your room if you can find a better valid price. Keep in mind that travel sites may have obsolete data that refreshes on attempted booking to a different price.

Orbitz will credit you with $100 if you pay more than someone else for the same deal on a heavily promoted TV ad. However, their “guarantee” is only for the same deal booked on Orbitz. If someone saves hundreds of dollars booking direct, the Orbitz customer has no right to collect. Travelocity and Expedia have similar $50 “guarantees”.

Airline lowest airfare guarantees are not as strong as the hotels but are often the lowest. Sometimes fares change 2 or 3 times a day. These fares will also differ from one booking day to another.

Some like American, Continental, and Northwest offer limited guarantees within a time window with $5 to $10 minimum swings and vouchers/credit for up to $50 to $100. They may charge up to $100 to re-book after the time window expires which overwhelms most cost savings, however.

VegasMadeEasy.com tested 9 travel websites, including the Big 3 and the Big 2, versus booking direct with the hotel and airline. We also tested Kayak.com which is a travel information website.

One of the tests was open-ended and the other hotel specific. We wanted the cheapest downtown casino/hotel and the Palazzo. The travel dates were October 17 and 19th from Denver (DEN) to Las Vegas (LAS). All fees and taxes were included. Here are the results:

Booking direct saved the most money. Some of the travel sites were much more expensive by significant amounts.

Orbitz listed Golden Nugget as the cheapest Downtown casino/hotel with a 2 night hotel and flight package of $550. Golden Nugget is the only premium hotel in the Downtown Las Vegas area.

Also, Hotwire, Expedia and Hotels.com would not show Palazzo or Venetian even if we searched specifically by name. Vegas.com came up with the highest rate of $990.50 for the Palazzo and air package. The Big 2 discounters, Priceline and Hotwire, tended to be a bit worse than the Big 3 surprisingly.

J.D. Powers rates travel websites along with other industries. They noted that the overall ratings of their tested travel websites (the Big 3, the Big 2 and CheapTickets.com) dropped last year. We would expect this to continue as a long term trend. They rated Hotwire, Travelocity and Expedia as the 3 best. Here is a link to their study.

Conde Nast Traveler reviewed travel websites for domestic hotel bookings and recommended Hotels.com with Orbitz, runner-up. Their author may not have included Las Vegas in tested itineraries. We only test for Las Vegas. Here is a link to that article.

If you would like to include low price Downtown casino/hotels and/or high end properties such as Venetian and Palazzo in your possible stays, you might have to adjust national survey findings. Orbitz, Expedia, Hotels.com and Hotwire do not seem to provide complete search results for Las Vegas.

However, if you insist on one stop shopping, Travelocity finished second in the J.D. Powers survey and Priceline sometimes does a reasonable job for Vegas for the pinch pennies.

Hotels.com has good hotel descriptions (unless you want to compare Venetian and Palazzo to other hotels) and was a top choice of Conde Nast Traveler. Kayak.com is not listed below because it is an information site where you end up booking directly with the hotel and airline. Here are some popular travel websites, none of which are recommended:

• CheapTickets.com
• Expedia.com
• Hotels.com
• Hotwire.com
• Orbitz.com
• Priceline.com
• Travelocity.com

There are other reasons to consider booking direct and separately. If your travel plans change, hotels and even the knuckleheaded airlines (to some extent) will work with you and often the hotels do not charge a fee with enough advance notice. This means you could re-rate a hotel stay if rates fall. If you book through a travel site and have an issue, the hotel and/or airline might tell you to contact the third party first. Recommended Websites:

• Kayak.com
• Southwest.com
• Farecast.com

Kayak.com is an information site, not a travel website. It searches for the lowest prices on over 140 airlines and thousands of hotels and also shows how air fare prices vary by booking day. You use this site to gather information but book direct with the hotel and airline not with a third party travel site unless that third party site has the low price as found by Kayak.

Below are websites that are owned or powered by Kayak. ITA’s website is also listed even though it is a separate, independent company but the engine supplier to Kayak. ITA generates similar search results for straightforward schedules but does not have the same user interface or features.

• SideStep.com (former competitor now same company as Kayak)
• Travel.AOL.com
• PinPointTravel.com
• TravelSearch.com
• ITASoftware.com

Air/hotel packages are new to Kayak and we found that it made a technical mistake on one of our package deals submitting a search to one of the Big 3 as 1 day when it was actually 2 days. It is getting better for hotel packages and may overtake the travel websites for hotel deals one day. However, when it comes to airfare, Kayak.com is recommended when combined with Southwest. Southwest will not be in the Kayak.com database and American might be out of their database until a dispute is settled.

VegasMadeEasy.com tested for 9 airports (ATL to SFO):

Roundtrip flights were for August 3 and 7th booked on June 25, 2008. All taxes and fees reported by the sites were used.

Kayak.com was the cheapest overall with Priceline second. Hotwire was the most expensive. This test is strictly for roundtrip flights to Las Vegas.

Southwest often flies out of different airports which might be a benefit or a curse. Here are the most comparable locations and prices back on the test date. Love Field, Midway and FLL are within the realm of reason substitutes for Dallas, Chicago and Miami. Islip is only feasible if you are well out on Long Island—Manhattan is not practical.

The Skytrax for Southwest is 3 stars out of 5 possible. Discount competitor JetBlue is higher at 4 stars and there are only 8 airlines at 5 stars. Here is a link to the Skytrax ratings. www.airlinequality.com

VegasMadeEasy.com recommends Southwest.com for the sheer volume of flights for Las Vegas, not for the Skytrax ranking which is okay but not great. Their prices are not in the Kayak.com database which means that a thorough search of Las Vegas airfare pricing must be done with these 2 websites at a minimum.

American might also be checked until an agreement with Kayak is reached. Note that Southwest Vacations is a travel agent that is not the same company as Southwest Airlines although they have a direct link on Southwest’s site. We recommend booking directly with Southwest Airlines if they are the best option.

When we checked the McCarran Airport (LAS) numbers, we were extremely surprised by Southwest’s market share as of August 2008. They are almost half the flights and seats into/out of Terminal 1 of LAS. We expected to see only about a 34% market share for Southwest. It seems as if Southwest has a giant hub in Las Vegas but technically they are not a hub type of airline.

McCarran has 2 terminals with Terminal 1 handling domestic commercial flights except for Hawaiian Airlines which is in Terminal 2 along with foreign and charters. Terminal 1 is 95.8% of the flights and 95.1% of the passenger seats for Las Vegas. Here are all the Terminal 1 air carriers who have at least weekly flights into LAS.

Note that Southwest’s 737s have slightly fewer seats than the 139.9 average for Terminal 1 flights so their market share for seats is lower than for flights.

Our third recommendation is Farecast.com which helps you time your flight purchase. It shows a 65 day history of fare changes for about 2 dozen originating cities to Las Vegas.

Potential savings are pretty good but not huge for those that have schedule flexibility. Farecast recommends when to buy or wait for better pricing and their historical forecast model has been right about 3/4 of the time. Here are the maximum theoretical savings for some selected airfares within Farecast’s 65 day window using Hotwire as the pricing source.

Our 21.0% average is the theoretical highest for our sampled airports but saving 5-10% on your flight may be a reasonable expectation. You will probably have less schedule flexibility than they assume and their predictions are not perfect.

Also, although it is well known to most travelers, for those visitors traveling for the first time, advance booking by at least 14 to 21 days will also save a lot of money. Short notice business travelers may pay several times your advance booking.

For many Vegas visitors, especially singles, you are much better off trying to get the best hotel deal and then worry about airfare second. Price swings are bigger and usually more important for hotels.

If you are a family visiting Vegas who will cram into 1 room, airfare may be more important and you would optimize for cheapest airfare. If you are a party of around 3 or so, look at both hotel and airfare prices simultaneously to find the best total deal.

International Visitors to Las Vegas

Some travel websites specialize in international flight information. However, we have not found any clear winner. Zuji seems to do well but might be a bit slower than others to update their database.

Travel and information sites use a dual database system. They keep a Local database of their own. This is updated from airlines and hotels Master databases fairly frequently but might have obsolete information. This is why you sometimes can’t book a deal at the listed price on a travel site.

Here are the tested cities. For example, CDG stands for Charles De Gaulle airport for Paris, and the 3 letter code for Beijing is still PEK even though Peking has fallen out of common use.

These were roundtrip fares to Vegas for October 18 and 25 booked as of September 11, 2008. The numbers were converted into U.S. Dollars and Zuji’s numbers were increased by 1% due to their credit card fee. If you don’t use credit cards to pay for airfare, then Zuji’s quotes would be slightly lower.

Code	Kayak	Opodo	Vayama	Zuji	High	Low	Savings	% Save
SYD	$2,079.30	$2,084.57	$2,109.24	$1,930.24	$2,109.24	$1,930.24	$179.00	8.5%
GIG	$1,524.80	$1,555.66	$1,544.80	$1,477.48	$1,555.66	$1,477.48	$78.18	5.0%
YYZ	$652.92	$603.19	$583.91	$578.43	$652.92	$578.43	$74.49	11.4%
PEK	$3,154.00	$1,520.01	$1,313.96	$1,355.57	$3,154.00	$1,313.96	$1,840.04	58.3%
LHR	$666.69	$680.81	$675.81	$654.04	$680.81	$654.04	$26.77	3.9%
CDG	$938.10	$1,089.96	$1,045.57	$1,054.30	$1,089.96	$938.10	$151.86	13.9%
HYD	$1,628.42	$1,780.96	$1,770.90	$1,679.90	$1,780.96	$1,628.42	$152.54	8.6%
NRT	$1,193.79	$1,325.80	$1,203.77	$1,163.31	$1,325.80	$1,163.31	$162.48	12.3%
MEX	$509.79	$577.73	$533.81	$518.76	$577.73	$509.79	$67.94	11.8%
JNB	$1,732.00	$1,830.65	$1,664.92	$1,491.13	$1,830.65	$1,491.13	$339.52	18.5%
DXB	$1,315.30	$1,234.83	$1,262.97	$1,083.76	$1,315.30	$1,083.76	$231.54	17.6%
	$15,395.11	$14,284.17	$13,709.66	$12,986.92	$16,073.02	$12,768.66	$3,304.36	20.6%

Note that prices change more day to day because of translation into a base currency such as the U.S. dollar. Also, normal price fluctuations appear to be larger for international flights. If you fly a longer distance, jet fuel costs are more important and oil is subject to big swings.

Always check to see if direct booking will save money. For example, the biggest maximum to minimum spread in the table above is $1,840.04 for PEK with Zuji showing the best rate versus Kayak.com which is mostly a domestic specialist. Kayak only had Japan, Korea and Cathay for their database while Zuji had Air Canada’s much cheaper Pacific flights.

However, if you direct booked with Air Canada, which Zuji selected as the low fare, you could save even more or about $240 or so given day to day fluctuations. Direct booking also helps when there are any issues.

In some previous testing we noticed that bmi and Iberia were sometimes undercut by the international travel sites, such as Vayama , for bmi and Iberia’s own flights. This might be a dual database latency issue but Vayama and Zuji are or were owned by travel agencies that might have some actual discounted tickets if they access or are wholesalers.

We recommend using several sources for international visitors including direct booking. Note that even though Kayak did very poorly for PEK, it was cheapest for 3 of the 11 test cities. There appears to be no easy way to find the cheapest flight to Vegas for the international traveler.

Note that Opodo, which is the very heavily backed travel site for Europe, did not do well in our tests. If you are visiting Vegas from a foreign country and want to omit Opodo, we can’t think of any objections. This might be a great site for Europe to Europe flights but our only concern is Las Vegas.