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.
