About Agoda.com (UK)

Agoda began in Asia and is now part of the same group as Booking.com. That heritage still shows in the inventory: its coverage of hotels across Asia is unusually deep, and it is competitive on city hotels worldwide.

It sells accommodation, and increasingly flights and packages, as an intermediary. The hotel is the supplier; Agoda is the booking channel.

How the pricing is built

The headline figure and the figure you pay are rarely the same. Taxes, service charges and local tourist levies may be shown separately or excluded entirely depending on the property and the country, so compare the final page rather than the search result.

Some rates are prepaid and non-refundable, others are pay-at-hotel with free cancellation. The gap between them is usually small, and the flexible rate is worth it whenever the trip depends on anything outside your control.

What to check before confirming

The cancellation deadline, in the hotel's local time zone rather than yours. Whether breakfast is included, because the same room appears twice with and without it. Whether the room sleeps the number of people you have entered, since child policies vary by property rather than by platform.

Resort fees and city taxes are commonly payable at the hotel in cash, and they are not part of anything a discount applies to.

When something goes wrong

A booking made through a platform is changed through that platform. Hotels routinely decline to amend a third-party reservation, so keep the confirmation number and contact the channel you booked with rather than the front desk.

Take a screenshot of the rate conditions at the time of booking. It is the only record that does not change afterwards.

Using an Agoda discount code

Codes usually apply to prepaid rates rather than pay-at-property ones, and often to selected regions only. Enter the code before the payment step and watch the total change, because on a large booking the difference between applied and not applied is easy to miss.