Spotty Selection and No Value
PriceQuotes
Aggregators, affiliate
sites and those loo king to form a home-based business acting as middlemen
abound on the web. I tend to avoid most of them because unless they have
huge volume, shoppers can often find better deals by buying direct. That
is the model Michael Dell used to change the PC industry.
You can still find bargains from aggregators such as Expedia in travel
or any of a host of subscription agencies because those bargains are only
available because the company buys in bulk, sells at a small discount
and keeps the spread. They function as large wholesalers and are more
likely to be found in industries considered to be commodities than others.
In travel, I have used and continue to use Expedia and others successfully
and therefore was eager to try PriceQuotes, hoping that one more player
in the crowded travel market would drive prices even lower. That’s what
happened to long distance. A price war that lasted for years drove every
company, even the venerable AT&T, to lower prices. The quagmire was a
huge loss for investors and a huge win for consumers.
Spotty Selection Hurts PriceQuotes
I had four trips scheduled between January 1 and February 15. My lodging
plans were flexible on two of the trips and exact for the other two. Visiting
the site, I was greeted with multiple banner ads and tiles promoting the
use of still more affiliate programs. After selecting “Hotel Price Quotes”,
I was given the option of selecting one of three other affiliate sites.
Needless to say, the entry form for location and dates did not translate
between the three programs, nor were they very user-friendly at all. One
of them, USA Hotel Guide, did not recognize any Boston suburbs. Another
listed amenities (e.g., continental breakfasts), but didn’t allow users
to drill into the locations. One nice feature was a rate set for each
day, indicating that the site had access to a blocked set of rooms, but
the rates were even with the hotel’s own site.
The third was the most promising, and I was set to use it for a trip
to the Chicago O’Hare Marriott. But after selecting an airport location
within Chicago, I was given four choices that didn’t include my destination.
I pushed ahead anyway, looking for some way to use the site since my choices
in Boston, San Francisco and Houston were all unavailable or unusable.
I finally selected the airport Hilton and was given a rate of $80-$300,
quite a spread for any site and ridiculous at the high end for airport
lodging. Hilton’s own site showed the same accommodations for $188-$209.
Could I have really saved $100 by booking through PriceQuotes?
We will never know. The site’s functionality and persistent error messages
scared me. I had no intention of being stranded at O’Hare at 10 p.m. and
forced to take a cab to another hotel. I passed on booking the reservation
through them and went direct — wasting more than twenty minutes clicking
back and forth between screens to find spotty selection, suspect pricing
and an uneasy feeling that I could no more trust a credit card number
to these sites than posting it on an eBay listing.
Other Things You Can Allegedly Do Here
PriceQuotes also offers pricing for insurance, home repair and auto purchasing.
Given that I was unwilling to trust the company’s spotty travel offering
for such a minor purchase, I can’t imagine using the site for anything important
or expensive.
But I was willing to try without buying in several other areas. The
company boasts that its offerings are “powered by” leading sites. That’s
a nice euphemism for PriceQuotes simply functioning as a middleman. Nonetheless,
I began comparing new car pricing. The company has done a better job of
integration in this area, compiling its own table of vehicles, but in
doing so, has left holes. For example, Honda’s new Element is missing
from the drop down lists. The Mercury list also has holes, providing an
option for four of the six vehicles the company rolled out for 2002 although
the 2003 list seems accurate.
After being prompted for year, make, model and zip code, the site displays
a stock photo of the vehicle and a comprehensive lead generation form
from Invoice Dealers. Auto dealers pay about $25 per lead for those
completed forms. Shoppers can select from four buying sites including
AutoNation (the nation’s largest retailer) and Autobytel.
But here is the rub. No pricing was available. Instead, shoppers offer
up their name, phone number and address to dealers. No value is provided
by PriceQuotes in this transaction. Indeed, the company seems to exist
solely as an affiliate program aggregator. Had the site bothered to create
a very comprehensive form that then populated the forms of the other sites,
I would be less harsh in my criticism, but after tooling around through
the auto and home improvement sites, I became more convinced that the
bigger ticket items were simply lead generation services. And forget the
insurance links.
Trust me. A salesperson will call. And frankly, that defeats the whole
purpose of comparison shopping on the web. If I want a salesperson to
pitch me on the phone and attempt to get me face-to-face, I’ll call the
company. If I want to book a hotel, I want a selection of all hotels in
the area like I would get at Expedia, not those who pay a commission for
leads. And if I want a home repair estimate, I’m screening out companies
using the BBB and my local consumer affairs office.
The Bottom Line, Clicks and All
I came to PriceQuotes with a fistful of plastic and the willingness
to book eleven room nights in four hotels. When I was done trying to make
the site work and marveling at the huge holes in their inventory, my level
of distrust had climbed to the point where I would not even buy a CD or
book from this site.
Five Things To Remember From This Review
1. Chances are good that you won’t be able to find the hotel you want to
stay at.
2. If you do find the hotel, you’ll likely miss bonus points available by
booking through the hotel’s site.
3. The site does not offer any sort of privacy policy although partner sites
(presented in a transparent frame) do. Can you spell spam at best?
4. The auto quotes site will forward your name and contact information to
dealers, charging them in the process.
5. Those dealers, who did not collect your name on the web, do not need
to limit themselves to privacy restrictions and can thus keep, use and sell
your contact information at will.
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