How hotel pricing, cancellation rules and fees actually work — so you pay what you expect to pay.
Hotels negotiate more often than their websites suggest - but only when asking costs them little and your stay fills a room they would otherwise sell cheaply or not at all.
A guide to every line that can appear between the rate you saw and the total you pay — and which ones you can refuse.
Four words decide whether you get your money back. Here is how to find them in under a minute.
The advice to "book early" is half right. What matters is which of two pricing regimes your trip falls into.
Six checks that take a minute and catch nearly every fraudulent booking site, cloned page and fake listing.
The right answer changes with trip length, group size and how much of the day you spend in the room.
Stars measure facilities against a national checklist, not quality. A four-star in one country can be a three-star in another and better than both.
Usually the room rate is identical. What differs is what you get around it — and there are cases where the booking site genuinely wins.