The truth about Atlantic City hotel
booking sites.

Or how to make more informed choices.

If you have been watching Tv and don’t fast forward your dvr thru the commericals, you can not help to see Trivago commercials.

Who is Trivago and why does that gray haired dude keep popping up? Another question that you can ask is who is Hotels.com, Expedia, Tripadvisor and  more travel sites. And one more you can ask who will be running Orbitz perhaps soon?

If you are seeing through this, you can safely guess that one company owns all these sites. Yep, one company is controlling your hotel choices and to an extent rates.

When you go to Trivago which is supposed to compare hundreds of sites, do you see AtlanticCity.com? And who do you see in the top sites for the rate comparisons?

Search for Atlantic City hotels… Are you being manipulated?

Folks the fix is in. In these days of big companies knowing what you do and what you search for, you can bet that Trivago will have the proper analytics. They know how to make sure that the hotels they want you to book, are the ones on their sites in top positions. Of course they make money off the other sites, but where do they make the most?

Now let’s take a look at Google. Do a search for any hotel in any city. We can use Atlantic City hotels for a prime example. But try it yourself for any city. We  did Atlantic City hotels and Orlando hotels.

First off you will see that no longer do you get fair results from Google for web sites in the top place. Google now loads the results from their ad choices for a  chunk of the  page.

You can not blame them. Google like any company is in business to make money. But where does this leave you. Google has the power to make you spend money where they want you to spend it. Not where you decide. They dictate the terms. The true search for hotel rates and websites is a thing of the past.

Secondly take a look who dominates the top positions after the ads in Google. I did a search in 2 cities. Atlantic City hotels and Orlando hotels. You can chose any city and do your own testing

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Who dominates the top positions? The above mentioned sites. You may be asking well how is this possible? Yes we know that those sites are popular. But don’t you think it is strange that in many cases they are on top? Why, how? I thought Google was a search engine that would give fair results you may think.

2 theories I have. Being that these sites are popular they have many links to them. But that still seems to be an issue in logic. If you look at the Orlando page or the Atlantic City hotels page from those sites there is no content that really talks about that city, except for Tripadvisor. So besides links that websites link to them, which really seems bizarre, as to why anyone would link to a site that just shows hotel rates, with little content, what else could be the reason they are on top?

Theory 2 is that they can hire they best people to understand how Google works. These guys work to make sure they can give Google what they are looking for. So to that end, they can force themselves to be at the top.

We can not fault them for this, as they are in business to make money. But who loses out? The consumer. Your choice is dictated.

Not that we are sour grapes here at AtlanticCity.com. We are a small company who has an actual presence in Atlantic City. We have hotel suppliers who work in Atlantic City. We also use other sources for Atlantic City hotels like Priceline, Getaroom. And you will find new information about Atlantic City hotels and  more that those guys don’t care to give you.

So in the end it is David vs Goliath to earn your business and trust as opposed to what some may call manipulating to do this. And as I stated it is not one city where this happens, it is across the spectrum on Google.

If you want a more fair assessment or what a search can produce try Bing or Yahoo. But like most people, we all prefer Google, and both Google and these websites know it, and you are lead by the hand to where they want to take you!