There are said to be 3 five star, 35 four star, 49 three star and 85 two star hotels scattered among the dozens of different towns and villages around Lake Como. There are no major ‘brands’, with uniform facilities and central reservations. Almost all of the hotels around the Lake are independent. Many of them are family run, each with its own unique combination of position, decor, furnishing, facilities, room categories and amenities.

So how does an independent traveller go about booking rooms in such an environment? The most painless way is through the hotel reservation sections of online travel sites, such as Venere, hotels.com and others. The only problem is that there are so many of those sites – perhaps twenty to thirty for Lake Como – that each is supplied by only a certain number of hotels. Choice is therefore limited.

This is where Hotels Combined comes in. But not as another online hotel reservation site. Instead, and by agreement, it uses a meta search engine on all of the leading reservation sites simultaneously, to provide you with a larger number of available hotel deals to consider than any other single site could do*. In addition, it provides detailed hotel information, a ‘refine search’ function, and ‘sort’ options, helping you to chose your hotel, before linking you on to the online reservation site that offered that deal, to complete your online booking with them.

The information generated by Hotels Combined includes prices from the same reservation sites for different hotels, and prices from different sites for the same, or a different, type of room in the same hotel. You can compare them and just accept the lowest. But in a situation where every hotel is unique, the combination of prices and other information also gives you the opportunity to compare the location, decor, furnishing, facilities and in – room amenities of one or more rooms or hotels with the prices quoted for each. This makes Hotels Combined a powerful ‘value for money’ comparison site, as well as a price comparison site.

*4 Hoteliers trade magazine