To search appropriate hotels, use filters

When you search for a hotel online, most of you have a few deal-breaker requirements. For me, it’s an elevator — I’m an old geezer and don’t do stairs very well. But it can range from a kitchen to being pet-friendly.

You can save time and hassle if you can limit your search to hotels that meet your needs, without cluttering up your response list with places that wouldn’t do, no matter what the price or other features.

To cater to that need, almost all hotel search engines include filters that allow you to exclude those unwanted responses. I checked eight top hotel search systems — Booking.com, Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, Kayak.com, Priceline.com, Tripadvisor.com,

By Ed Perkins

and Trivago.com — and although they all use filters, each uses a somewhat different set of filters.

All eight include some basic filters:

– Price range

– Access to promotional prices

– Location/neighborhood within a larger city and map view search options

– Type of property: hotel, motel, B&B, vacation rental, etc.

– Some measure of attractiveness, such as star ratings or user reviews

– Acceptance of pets

– Accessible room availability

But I found some differences in treatment of what I figured might be among the more important deal-breaker features for most travelers:

– Pricing. I’m amazed that Kayak is still the only top engine that allows you to search for what you really pay, including taxes and fees, from the get-go. All of the others ultimately show you the phony “resort” and similar add-on fees and taxes before you book, but only Kayak lets you choose to see the real price in big numbers from the start of your search.

This isn’t important if you’re searching for roadside motels or outside North America, where such fees are rare. But it can make a big difference if you’re looking in a popular North American vacation destination.

– Cancellation policy. Most big systems allow you to limit your search to bookings that don’t require nonrefundable prepayment, but I couldn’t find that filter on Hotwire.