Agoda.com Review

I book a lot of hotel rooms every year, almost all my personal travel is done with hotel points and free night certificates but when it comes to business travel I am able to book my own hotel rooms using cash and then get reimbursed by my employer. Originally the majority of my stays where done at your general hotel chains (Hilton, SPG & Hyatt) I was able to amass a good stockpile of points for my personal stays and earn status. Recently my employer changed the rules and are trialing a new system where we are now given a set budget per day, this includes all of our business travel expenses (e.g accommodation, food and transport) as well as a per diem for various expenses.

When I was booking chain stays, I simply went to the separate chain websites entered my destination and typically chose the cheapest room. Now that I am looking for budget but comfortable stays I’ve had to change my hotel booking process (we also have a travel agent we can book through, but they are borderline useless).

Pros of Agoda.com

• Price. Agoda usually has the best or similar rates to hotels listed on their site.
• Allows you to search by area (e.g I can choose to only see hotels in the downtown area or near the airport) this is particularly useful for big cities. Obviously other sites have a map, but this lets me just select hotels in the airport or downtown area.
• Customer support. I’ve needed a refund from an Agoda booking in the past (reception was closed even though they said they’d stay open for our 2am arrival, which meant we had to stay elsewhere) and Agoda managed to process this within 24 hours. I’ve read several reviews where people didn’t have the same level of service but I can only speak from my own experiences.

Cons of Agoda.com

• No quality control. You really need to read the reviews of the hotels and look at their star/user ratings. I mistakenly didn’t do this one time and ended up in a hovel of a hotel with ripped bed sheets, other peoples hair still in the bed and filth all over the room. Realistically I should have known better as it was only $20/night but the pictures made it look fantastic.
• Doesn’t allow user uploaded photos. When looking through properties, you’re only able to see photographs that have been uploaded by the hotel owner. This are often highly staged and done by professional photographers that can make the room look much better than it actually is. Other sites (e.g TripAdvisor) allow user submitted photos which can give you a better feel for what the accommodation actually looks like.
• Filtering by “Accommodation type” does not work. Often when I sort properties I want to sort by price first. When I do this I invariably get a bunch of hostel dorm rooms as the first results (sometimes the first few pages of results in big cities). You would have thought that deselecting “hostels” from the “Accommodation type” section in the sidebar would fix this, but you’d be wrong.
• Some hotels require a printed copy of your reservation. I’ve been to a few different hotels (all international) where I was required to present a printed copy of my Agoda certificate showing I had paid. I’m unsure why the reference/booking number is not enough (and usually it is) but some hotels have not allowed check in until it was presented. All of these hotels have allowed me to print it off using their facilities, but I’d rather not waste paper or enter my log in credentials on anything other than my own laptop if at all possible.
• Airport pick ups cannot be organized directly through Agoda. They have a section which allows you to put your flight information in, but they also specifically say that all airport pick ups must be organized through the hotel directly (even if they are included in the room rate). This is just another layer of hassle that I’d rather not deal with.

Agoda.com Cash Back/Shopping Portals

It’s possible to get a further discount on Agoda by using a shopping portal. Make sure you check cashbackmonitor for updated rates (although I’ll try to remember to update this page regularly).

• Topcashback: 6%
• ExtraBux: 4%
• Simply Best Coupons: 3%
• Ebates: 3%
• Panda Cash Back: 3%
• Coupon Cactus: 2.5%

Our Verdict

My feelings on Agoda are pretty mixed, they do an excellent job in some respects but in the end I’ve currently got to many issues with the site to keep on using it. I haven’t been able to find a hotel booking website that ticks all of my requirements, which means in the end I use several of these websites at once (e.g Agoda for locations, Tripadvisor for user photos, hotelscombined or similar for price, hotelwifitest for wifi speeds etc etc).

The other thing that I don’t like about Agoda is that they don’t have any in built loyalty program, which means I always need to remember to click through a cashback portal first.

What do you use for hotel bookings? Have you used Agoda before? If so, did you have a positive or negative experience? Let me know which hotel booking website you think I should use for my business trips and why.

Also, would you like to see more of these reviews or stick strictly to consumer credit news and tips?