How to check your hotel's price on every booking site

Start with the sites you have a contract with. Then look for the ones you don't: a travel agent or a wholesaler you gave a rate to can pass your rooms on to other sites, at prices you never set.

• Search your hotel's name on Google, on a phone and on a computer, and open the list of prices beside your hotel. Every site in it is selling you.
• Choose a few different dates and look again: some sites appear only on some nights.
• Search for your hotel on the booking sites your guests use, signed out. A site that Google doesn't list may still sell you.
• Write down every site, and beside each, whether you gave it your rooms yourself.

When a guest looks at your hotel on Google and picks dates, Google lists the places to book it, each with its price. Paid places carry an Ads label, and the rest are listed under All options. In Google's lists of many hotels, the price shown for each hotel is the lowest any site offers for it. It is the quickest way to see every site at once, and it is what a guest comparing prices sees.

It is still a summary. Google asks the sites that send it prices to match their own booking page, tax and fees included, and checks them, but it warns that hotel prices change quickly. Before you act on a lower price, open the site's own page.

1. 1Pick about ten nights over the coming three months: weekdays and weekends, and any busy dates in your town.
2. 2Search each night for one room and two adults, or one bed for one guest at a hostel.
3. 3Note your own website's price, then each site's, in a sheet: the night, the site, the price, the room, the cancellation terms, the meals, and whether tax is included.
4. 4For every site cheaper than your website, open its booking page in a private window, signed out, and check the price there.
5. 5Look in the site's app as well, if it has one: some prices are shown only there, or only to signed-in members.
6. 6Save a screenshot of every lower price you confirm, with the date you took it.

Many of the lower prices a check turns up are a different offer, not a cheaper one. Before you call a price an undercut, check that both are for:

• The same room, not a smaller one with a similar name.
• The same cancellation terms. A non-refundable price is a different offer from a flexible one.
• The same meals: a room alone against a room with breakfast is not a fair comparison.
• The same guests: a price for a site's signed-in members or its app is meant only for them, until it is shown to everyone.
• Tax in, or tax out, on both.

• Find where the price comes from first. A promotion switched on in your account with the site, a discount the site pays for itself, and a rate you gave a travel agent or wholesaler each have a different fix.
• Write to your contact at the site with the nights, both prices and the screenshots, and ask for the price to be put right.
• If a site you never signed with sells you, the room name and the terms on its page usually point to the partner who passed your rate on. Ask that partner to stop.
• Check the same nights again a week later. A price put right on one night can come back on another.

Prices on booking sites change every day, and a promotion can start on any of them. A check once a month finds what happens to be wrong that morning. A check every week, across the same coming nights, shows which site is cheaper, on which nights and how often: the evidence a site asks for when you raise it.