Booking is the worst of them. You can open two tabs of one account next to each other and since one is from Google Maps pricing gonna be. 20% different.
Also all kind of cashback or discount offers just bake even higher premium than Cashback they offer.
So yeah booking hotels is more and more like a whack-a-mole game if you don't want to pay 30% more.
It used to be that you could use Booking and get a cheaper reservation than using the hotels own website. Today, it seems to be the opposite, the prices for hotels are almost always cheaper on their website than Booking...
This is a common online trope, but has almost never been true for me when I’ve checked. (US domestic ~4 star hotels) Direct is more or at least equal to the aggregator prices.
