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Comment by xfour | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone used HotelTonight in the last two years? Curious as I thought they were leaps ahead with their app early in the iOS native development cycle but I've heard crickets about them since

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I've happily used it a few times this year - I almost always check their prices against bigger sites like hotels.com and they can usually provide a lower price if I'm booking after 6PM (before then and it's often the same price you can find directly from the hotel). More importantly, I very much value their curated set of "advice" about the hotel, and find it significantly easier to filter than sites like booking.com or otherwise.

Their mobile app is nice, and the flow is extremely smooth. I did once have to wait 45 minutes at a Best Western for their customer support to fax something across before I was able to get my room.

I check it occasionally when doing a same-day hotel booking and I have never found a good deal. (I've only tried it for US hotels.) Very often the best price I have already found for a hotel will be matched on Hotel Tonight, but then they add their fee on top of it, making it a worse deal. And I don't like that they don't tell you about this fee till late in the purchase flow. Plus (and my info could be out of date on this point), HT doesn't tell you the bed situation in the room. Whereas on other booking sites, I know it's going to be two queens or whatever.

They used to have better rates, lately they seem to be no better than Kayak. My source for cheaper last minute hotels has been LMTClub.

Don't get me wrong hoteltonights support is great but all in all cost isn't as huge of a reason for me to use them as it was when they first came out.

I used it a year ago to book a last minute hotel, when I got to the hotel 30 mins later they said they hadn't gotten it and they had no rooms available anyway. After they called Hotel Tonight and 20 mins of waiting for faxes they found a room for us though.

Not sure if that's a positive review or not, but it worked out for me.

I used it two weeks ago for the first time, got a hotel reservation two hours before arriving at 2 am for a fair price. Paid with Apple Pay and avoided thinking about currency exchange rates, etc. Very convenient iOS app.

I used it for the first time last weekend and it worked pretty well. The app is really great.

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