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Bingo! New Site Makes Booking Hotels Feel Like A Game Show

March 22, 2012 at 10:09 AM | by | Comments (0)

Lots of action in the online hotel booking world this week: earlier, we heard about BackBid, which asks hotels to bid on your individual reservation. And yesterday, a new site launched with the slightly off-kilter name Tingo (makes us think of a cross between those crunchy corn sticks and Bingo) that promises to continually cancel and re-book your reservation to get you the best possible rate.

Knowing how much hotel rates fluctuate week to week—and, indeed, day to day—this makes a lot of sense. But we can't imagine hotels are too happy about it. The new site basically negates the concept of a reservation and turns it into something much more fluid, so that what you really end up with is the intention of booking a room at a specific hotel, but never really settling until you've shaved off as many extra dollars as possible from the original rate.

So, is this something people are actually doing?

Apparently, yes. The site cites two recent examples of travelers booking rooms at Wynn Las Vegas, Casablanca Hotel in New York, and The Chesterfield in London, respectively. While latter two saved around 25%-30% on their one-night stays, the Las Vegas traveler saved almost half of the original price paid ($1,243), ending up with a two-night stay for only $724.

The way it works is that the site monitors rates of hotels all over the world (the main cities listed on the front page include Paris, London, New York City, Orlando and Las Vegas). Once you've booked your stay through Tingo, it will then constantly check for lower rates, and when it finds them, will re-book the same reservation for you. If the price goes down again, you get more money back; if it stays the same or goes up, your reservation holds in place.

For example, by clicking on Las Vegas, you'll get a whole list of hotels, listed in descending order by price. At the bottom of the screen, a little box announces that "133 hotels in Las Vegas saw prices drop" in the past 30 days at an average rate of $26.97.

We always wondered about ways to capitalize on the fickle nature of hotel rates. This might be the best solution for now. But will it actually end up helping travelers in the long run?

Care to weigh in? We welcome comments, thoughts, concerns from industry experts and regular old travelers alike!

[Photo: Tingo]

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