> I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews.
Why do you need so many properties and reviews? You're staying in one room, presumably. You just need at least one room with a few good reviews in your price range and you're good to go.
I find it strange too, though that may be because of the type of locations I stay. I don't seen any reason for customer loyalty to a single booking site. There is very little friction to just use the hotels own booking sites. For each town I stay in there is usually two or three hotels to choose from that have online booking (occasionally I have to make a phone call to book since there are no hotels with online booking.) From those two or three, I sort them by price, and work from the cheapest to the most expensive until I find the cheapest that I think will provide what I want, and book using that hotels site. Occasionally it is booking.com, but more often than not, it is the Motel 6 corporate site or the Comfort Inn corporate site or similar.
I also never look at reviews since my experience has found that reviews are useless to me. I think reviewers tend to care about things I don't, and have had excellent experiences at places with generally bad reviews.
> I also never look at reviews since my experience has found that reviews are useless to me. I think reviewers tend to care about things I don't, and have had excellent experiences at places with generally bad reviews.
This is the same with restaurant reviews on sites like Yelp. A restaurant that has 2.5 stars could have excellent, delicious food but are docked points because people who went there and reviewed cared more about the service than the food, or expected the service to be top notch at a place where great service isn't typically expected.
> I don't seen any reason for customer loyalty to a single booking site. There is very little friction to just use the hotels own booking sites.
Each site has its own layout and functionality. I like to use the same site every time so that the buttons will always be in the same place, I know how to sort by my criteria, the customer service number is already in my phone...
Because since people's tastes differ, if a site has a small inventory, it's very likely they will have nothing at least some of the time you want to book. If some small site has nothing that's a fit for you even, say, 10% of the time, the vast majority of people would choose a site they know will have something all of the time.
Why do you need so many properties and reviews? You're staying in one room, presumably. You just need at least one room with a few good reviews in your price range and you're good to go.