DealBase-less Claims?

I don’t meant to put a damper on the DealBase hit parade--I think it’s a great site--but there are clearly kinks to be worked out. I know because I have to deal with these sort of details myself every month, working on the Deals page for Travel + Leisure.

One of DealBase’s claims to fame is a “Deal Analyzer”, breaking down packages from hotels to their individual elements to show users where they get their savings percentages. Interesting, and the analysis looks great, but it doesn't pass the sniff test.

Take one of their featured deals, a “Burger and Beer” special from the Hotel Jerome in Aspen. It’s a  sweet property, and I’d be excited to stay there for $159 a night--in high season, no less--instead of the $599 rate DealBase cites from Hotels.com for comaprison's sake. DealBase also claims that the package is available on “select dates” as of February 2nd. In other words--you could save a lot of money booking here, right?

Not exactly. If you click through to the Hotel Jerome’s web site, you'll find that $159 a night rate is only available from April 12th to May 2nd. Try and book for a weekend in mid-March, and you’ll come up with a rate of $470 a night, after taxes, for the Burger and Beer package. (The pricing for the food and bev at the hotel’s J-Bar checks out, at least. Why, there’s even up to $2 extra savings if you order a couple pints of Guinness). In other words, DealBase doesn’t check their work; they’ve cherry-picked rates from the high season ($599 a night) and comparing them with rates in the low season ($159 a night) to get to a savings rate of 75 percent.

Is the Burger and a Beer package a good deal in general? If you booked a regular room without burgers on the same dates in March, you’d pay $623 a night after taxes, as opposed to $470 a night with the burger and beer package. With the B&B included in that value, the savings is 30 percent, not 75 percent, as DealBase claims. Still a fine deal, but not the boffo numbers DealBase cites.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m really craving burgers and beers.    

Comments

[Sam]

Thank you for taking a look at DealBase.com, and we're glad you overall think it's a great site! We're sorry about the issue you've had with this deal.

As background, sometimes, travel deals have different pricing over the dates of the offer, such as with this deal. In these cases, we will list the lowest price available, and indicate that this is a starting price (by adding "& up" after the price), and then tell users that the deal may not be available on all dates (with the "select dates" text you mention). We then compare the deal to a market-price hotel rate, using data from Hotels.com that is updated frequently. In this case, we did not use the appropriate comparison rate reflecting low season prices. We apologize for this problem.

To remove any ambiguity on this deal, we changed the date range to just the dates where the $159/night price was available, and listed the other prices in the deal description. We also changed the regular price, comparison rate to be for the same off-season date range.

I should also mention we have no commercial relationship with Hotel Jerome. This was an honest oversight and we'll work hard to make sure it never happens again.