Hotel price comparison and special offers
Ben
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Homepage: http://www.sletoh.com
Posts by Ben
Holiday Inn Norwich City
Aug 29th
Opened in June 2007, the Holiday Inn Norwich City offers guests a 3 course meal at Delia Smith’s acclaimed restaurant.
For £138 two guests can stay at the hotel on a Friday night and enjoy the meal in the hotel situated right next to Norwich City football club, where Delia is a director. Great for food buffs and football fans alike!
This offer is only available until December 31st 2007.
Hilton London Kensington
Aug 16th
The Hilton London Kensington on Holland Park Avenue has completed a £3.5m contemporary refurbishment. 300 of the hotel’s rooms have been given a modern makeover, while a Purity Mind & Body spa has been introduced and the restaurant and coffee lounge have been given a new look and feel.
The luxurious hotel is located just off Holland Park and near to Notting Hill. The refurbishment included the introduction of LCD televisions into all of the rooms, neutral accentuated by burgundy colour scheme, the West Eleven restaurant has been decked out in chocolate-box mahogany and purple tones, offering modern European fare including scallops poached in coconut cream and prime Scottish fillet steak.
Both guests and private members can use the Purity Body & Mind spa which offers a holistic body care system incorporating Dermalogica’s unique system of personalised skincare routines. Treatments include facials, jet lag massage, St Tropez tanning and nail care.
Hilton London Kensington is located at 179-199 Holland Park Avenue, London, W11 4UL.
Hotel du Vin at One Devonshire Gardens Refurb
Aug 9th
Twelve new opulent bedrooms have just opened at the Hotel du Vin at One Devonshire Gardens in Glasgow. Guests can indulge in four poster beds, deep, roll top baths and fireplaces in each room.
Each of the rooms is named after famous winemakers – tying in with the Hotel Du Vin name and reflecting the promise of the superb in-house wine cellar (with no less than 600 bottles) and reached by a secret passageway.
In addition to the new opulent rooms, another 12 rooms have been refurbished in the hotel. Hotel du Vin now has a total of 49 sumptuous bedrooms, a Bistro deluxe restaurant, whisky Snug wine cellar, gym, treatment room and three private dining rooms.
UKs most expensive golf course opens
Aug 9th
At £7 million, the new Carrick course at the De Vere Deluxe Resort at Cameron House on the shores of Loch Lomond is believed to be the most expensive ever constructed in the UK.
The Carrick is part of the De Vere Deluxe Resort at Cameron House which is currently undergoing a major upgrade and development, which includes The Carrick course, a new state-of-the-art luxury spa and a £25m refurbishment of the five star hotel itself.
Guests can travel to The Carrick by car or by boat onboard the beautiful 1937 launch, Belle Époque, from the hotel jetty. The boat journey takes golfers past the resort’s nature reserve which was created with the input of Scottish Natural Heritage and the RSPB and stretches over 100 acres.
The course fee at the Carrick at Cameron House is £100. For ladies and non-golfers there is also a spa open to day guests.
London Accommodation Near Tube Stations
Jul 18th
Are you travelling to London and worrying about getting lost in one of Europe’s biggest and most hectic cities? Or are you one of the tourists who find it really difficult to read a street map and always end up on a bus going in the wrong direction? There is a simple way to get your bearings and keep abreast of London’s tangled streets to get the most of this wonderful city: stay in accommodation close to a tube station
London’s Underground rail network (the Tube) was the first of its kind in the world and is the perfect way to travel and navigate through the city in the shortest amount of time. The tube map is easy to read as all the lines are colour coded and the whole network is broken down into 6 zones. Zone 1 is Central London and the main tourist area, whilst zone 6 is outer London.
With 275 tube stations and 11 recognisable tube lines, tube stations offer a unique network of reference points. This station network is the perfect basis for a website to help London visitors find accommodation. The website is called www.TubeHotels.com.
Location, Location, Location
Tubehotels.com shows the location of London hotels, hostels, bed & breakfasts and apartments relative to London tube stations on an interactive Google map. The website incorporates accommodation from several leading hotel reservation websites to give users a huge range of places to stay. In fact, there are more than 800 hotels, bed & breakfasts, guesthouses, hostels and apartments to choose from.
To help users decide which accommodation to book, each one has a description, photos, a map showing the exact location and distances to the three nearest tube stations. Many websites describe location as ‘it takes 5 min from here to there’ but this is very subjective as everybody walks at a different pace. TubeHotels gives distances in miles from accommodation to the nearest tube stations and with the map you can calculate for yourself the actual time to get there.
Compare Hotel Prices
When users check availability, TubeHotels compares prices from several websites and presents a table of prices for each hotel ordered by price, with the cheapest price first. Links to each website’s booking page are provided for a quick and easy reservation.
TubeHotels compares prices from these accommodation sites:
Tubehotels.com is a free service and there are no hidden costs or fees added to the accommodation prices.
How To Book London Accommodation
6 easy steps to booking accommodation in London:
- London is a big city so you need to have some bearing on where to stay. Ask friends for advice or research the things you want to see and do on the web. When you know where you want to be, note down the Tube Station.
- Enter the Tube Station into TubeHotels.com
- Decide how many stars you want your accommodation to have: 1-3 stars are budget hotels, hostels, bed and breakfasts and guesthouses. 4 and 5 star are upmarket and luxury hotels and apartments.
- Decide how far you want to be from the tube station and enter the distance.
- Enter your dates and room requirements and search.
- Available accommodation will be listed with prices from each web site. You can sort the list by price, distance, star rating and hotel name. TubeHotels does not list reviews but the sites we link to do provide them so click through for reviews. When you find the right hotel, click the ‘Book’ link next to the prices to reserve your room.
Accessibility
For hard of sight users, TubeHotels includes a text resizing tool at the bottom right hand corner of the site.
Added France and Spain
Jul 1st
We added France to the site recently so you can now compare Paris hotels or Nice hotels or any other city in France. Find yourself a hotel bargain, jump on Eurostar (trains are better for the environment than planes) and enjoy gay Paris!
We are almost finished adding Spain too. Compare Madrid hotels or Barcelona hotels for a city break, or try one of the Costas, Balearic or Canary Islands for a beach holiday.
0870 Numbers and Travel Web Sites
Jun 21st
Price comparison is made difficult by hidden charges. sletoh displays the prices that supplier websites give to us but some websites exclude local country tax (VAT in the UK), credit card charges and other fees. Its similar to the airlines adding on fees for priority boarding, meals, baggage and even sitting next to each other – but that’s another can of worms for a separate blog!
In this entry I am going to focus on the after sales part of the equation and what happens when you want to speak to the website you booked with. Is it in the same country or do you have to call abroad at great expense? The scope of this matter is very wide so I am going to limit this blog to UK based websites and UK based customers. How much does it cost to call your travel company?
0870 Numbers
A friend of mine complained to me that he spent 45 minutes calling his bank to have an incorrect £11 fee removed from his account. The call cost him dear and a portion of it goes into the banks already bulging coffers. Its no wonder the banks are making record profits when they hide behind semi-premium rate numbers, keeping their customers waiting whilst clocking up more revenue.
0870 numbers are a problem because on average they cost a lot more than calling a normal UK phone number such as 0207 (London), 01422 (Halifax), 0113 (Leeds). 0870 are also excluded from most free call plans on mobile phones and landlines. Whenever you call 0870 and its cousins 0845, 0871 you are paying more than you should for the call.
Sadly, all but one of the websites that sletoh currently compares use 0870 numbers:
- ActiveHotels – 0870 7120689
- diytravel – 020 7183 7183
- Laterooms – 0870 300 6969
- OctopusTravel – 0870 1624033 or 020 7760 6051
- Superbreak – 0870 234 0354
I had a scout round the web and found more companies using 0870 and profiting from customers calls:
- reserveahotelonline – 0870 4215081
- Alpharooms – 0871 911 0030 or 0200 200 9366
- HolidayNights – 0870 027 2096
This is very disappointing! The use of 0870, 0871 is widespread in the travel industry and its not just for after sales care as I thought it would be – its for sales lines too. As soon as you make an enquiry with many of these companies you are paying too much for the phone call.
If you know of any other UK based travel websites that I should add to this list, please add a comment to this blog.
Hello world!
Jun 2nd
Welcome to the brand new sletoh blog and my first ever blog entry on any blog, anywhere. I have been told I am missing out – we will see!
Since this is the sletoh blog, it will be all about hotel price comparison. Well I say hotel, but it will cover all forms of accommodation from budget hostels, up to bed and breakfasts and guesthouses, through all hotels whatever their star rating, and onto apartments, villas and the like. It won’t cover camping or caravan sites I am afraid!!
I first launched sletoh 4 years ago but closed it down after 6 months to concentrate on another site that was doing the same thing but a lot more successfully. Now 4 years on, my knowledge of the industry is far deeper and broader and sletoh v2 is already leaps and bounds past the original site. And we haven’t even got started yet!
At the moment sletoh compares 5 accommodation web sites (ActiveHotels, Laterooms, diytravel, OctopusTravel and Superbreak) and 3 countries – Uk, Ireland and Germany. We will be adding more suppliers and countries over the next few weeks – I will keep the blog updated with progress.
That’s it for my first ever post. It was surprisingly easy and I think I might get into this – its feels therapeutic to write down what we are doing / have done – it might help stop it whirling round my head!
Ben
