How a Holiday in Greece Taught Us That Hotels Charge You More Depending on Where You Search

I was halfway through a holiday in Chalkidiki when I started planning my next trip. That's a traveller thing — you're never quite done looking ahead.

I found a hotel I liked for an upcoming stay. Checked the price on Booking.com. It felt high, but I was tired and almost booked it anyway. Something made me pause — I'd look at it again at home.

The moment we noticed

Two weeks later, back at my desk, I pulled up the same hotel, the same dates, the same room. The price was nearly 20% lower than what I'd seen in Greece.

My first assumption was that prices had dropped while I was away. So I checked an old browser tab I'd left open before my trip. The price hadn't moved. It was exactly what I remembered from before I left.

The gap wasn't a price drop. It was a location gap. Booking.com had shown me a more expensive price because I was searching from Greece. Back home, the same hotel showed the cheaper rate it always had.

It wasn't a one-off

A few weeks later it happened again — this time in reverse. A friend visiting from the US mentioned they'd booked the same hotel we'd recommended. We compared what we'd each paid. They had paid €40 more than us. Same room. Same night. Same platform. Our home country simply gets quoted a lower base price than theirs.

That confirmed it wasn't just about travelling abroad. The gap is baked into your home market too — you just never see it because you have nothing to compare it to.

I spent the following days checking more hotels. Same pattern everywhere — consistent 10–35% differences depending on the country the search came from. Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia. All of them pricing the same room differently based on location.

This isn't an accident or a glitch. Booking platforms use pricing algorithms that adjust rates based on where a visitor is located — reading your IP address, device locale, and currency to match what users in your market typically pay. It's called geo-pricing, and the vast majority of travellers have never heard of it. Which means most people book at whatever price they're shown, without ever knowing a cheaper rate exists for the exact same room.

Why we built CahooTravel

Once you know geo-pricing exists, the manual fix is obvious: switch your VPN to the cheapest country and book from there. The problem is the step before that — finding out which country is cheapest for this specific hotel, on this specific date. That means changing your location 100+ times and refreshing the page each time. Nobody does that.

We built CahooTravel to do that part automatically. Paste a hotel link — we check the price from every country simultaneously and show you the full picture in seconds. Which country is cheapest. How big the gap is. Exactly how much you could save.

One search replaces hours of manual checking. You get the answer in seconds and book with confidence — knowing you have the cheapest available rate.

What we've found since

Across the searches our users run every month, we consistently see price differences of 15–35% for the same room on the same night. The gap exists for budget hotels and five-star resorts. It's present in Tokyo, Lisbon, New York, Bali, and hundreds of other destinations. It affects Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia, and most major platforms.

If you've never checked whether you're being shown the cheapest price, there's a reasonable chance you haven't been.

— The CahooTravel team