As you know, I have been to Amsterdam a few weeks ago on vacation. I love the city and plan to go back there again. As I wrote in a previous post, I booked my stay online and was quite happy. But I just discovered a site that actually focuses on Amsterdam hotels giving them an advantage over other more general sites.

You see most sites use what’s called the GDS (Global Distribution Systems) through which hotels list their rooms for thousands of agents around the world. This makes it easy both for the hotels to reach a huge agent base and offers agents (and websites) the option of listing thousands of hotels from around the world.

But the system is expensive and they charge a large commission. This raises the prices for the agents and therefore for their customers too. But easytobook.com works directly with the hotels so they can offer much lower prices. Of course this is only possible if you focus on a few niche markets and therefore easytobook.com deals only with hotels in New York, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Prague, London and Dublin. I actually found the hotel I stayed at offered for almost 10% lower on their site.

I’ll have to remember this one…