Trivago is a scam! (fake prices)

Instead of visiting every booking site on the internet, Trivago claims to be the world’s largest hotel search and information website, and to compare hotel prices accumulated from over 200 booking sites worldwide. As such, the company claims you’ll have the ability to view more than 700,000 hotels, and to save an average of 35% compared to booking your room directly through a hotel.

Trivago Details
Because Trivago allows you to compare hotel deals across the U.S. and around the world from more than 200 booking sites, they claim to be an ideal starting point for live travel research. From budget hostels to luxury suites, Trivago claims to have 45 million monthly users, and a million searches per day.

With this in mind, searching for hotel rooms on Trivago works over two steps:
Enter the city where you’d like to locate a hotel room, as well as the date you’ll need it, and…
Search for you room, which can be filtered by price, distance to attractions, number of stars, available facilities (e.g. pool, gym, etc.), and more.
Trivago also claims to include more than 82 million hotel reviews from users, and more than 14 million property photos that can help you make the most informed decision about where you’ll stay. As such, each listing in your search will display the name of the hotel, the city it’s located in, average user rating, up to 6 prices, which booking site is advertising the price, and a picture (if available).

Once you locate a property you’re interested in, you can click on the View Deal button, which will forward you to the booking site that has the actual room. If you decide to book your hotel room from here, keep in mind that the transaction will occur directly between you and the booking site, not with Trivago.

Trivago Pricing
Trivago is completely free, and you’re not required to sign up in order to use the service. This is because Trivago aggregates hotel deals from other booking sites (e.g. Hotels.com, Expedia, Agoda, etc.), who then pays Trivago a commission for the referral.

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What Do Other Consumers Have to Say About Trivago?
Trivago was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. The company’s U.S. operation (based in New York, NY) holds a B rating with the Better Business Bureau, with just 2 closed complaints over the past three years, neither of which the company responded to.

Online customer reviews regarding Trivago appear to be mixed, with the most common complaints citing:
Changed booking dates – The top complaint we encountered about Trivago is that customers would find a hotel they were interested in, click on the View Deal button, and then proceed to make their reservation through the third-party booking site. However, they often noticed that the dates would be changed (sometimes as much as several months), and when they corrected the date, would often find that the price increased dramatically.
Incorrect prices – Several customers (even some hotel managers/owners) complained that Trivago would list the wrong per-night prices. In other words, Trivago might show a hotel in NYC as normally being $300 per night, but now available at a reduced rate of $230. However, the reality may be that the hotel’s normal prices are actually $235, giving you little savings.
Lost bookings – We read numerous reviews claiming that a hotel reservation was made, but when the customer contacted the hotel directly to confirm, they showed no reservation was processed, despite the company charging the customer’s credit card. While this is most likely due to a third-party vendor’s error, this was a common complaint specifically directed at Trivago.
Unresponsive customer service – Perhaps because Trivago is just an aggregator, and doesn’t actually provide any hotel deals directly, their customer service department appears to have a reputation of ignoring emails.

Read the full article here: http://www.highya.com/trivago-reviews