How we make money, and who holds your booking

Where the money comes from

We earn a margin on the rates we sell. A supplier makes a room available to us at one price; we display it at another, and the difference is our revenue. That margin is already inside the number you see on the rate.

There is no separate booking fee and no service charge added later. Taxes and fees are included in the total shown before you reach the payment step. If the figure at checkout is ever higher than the figure on the rate you selected, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.

Who actually takes the payment

Payment is collected through our travel-technology and payment partner, which acts as the merchant of record for the supplier portion of your booking. In practice this means three things worth knowing:

• Your card details are entered into that partner's hosted payment fields. We never see, store or transmit a full card number.
• The charge on your statement comes from the party that collected the payment, which is why the descriptor may not read exactly “Book The Bed”.
• Any refund due under the rate rules is returned by the same party, to the same card. We cannot route it anywhere else, and neither can you — that constraint protects you more than it constrains you.

Who owes you the room

The supplier does. We act as an agent: we find the room, arrange the booking and surface the rules, but the contract for the stay itself is between you and the hotel or its consolidator, on their rate rules. The same applies to flights and the fare rules of the operating airline.

This is the single most useful thing to understand about booking through any agency, because it decides who can change your booking and what a refund depends on. Our terms set the relationship out in full, and the cancellation policy covers what happens when plans change.

What we are not paid for

No hotel pays us to appear higher in search results, and no supplier pays for placement, a badge or a label anywhere on this site. Nothing on a results page is an advertisement. How the ordering is actually decided is set out in how we rank hotels.

We also do not sell your personal data. What we collect and why is in the privacy policy.