www.roomkey.com is the hotel franchises attempt to get control back of online reservations.
Also, the best method is simply finding out the hotel's phone number via Google or TripAdvisor, and speaking with someone at the hotel. This way, you can guarantee yourself a certain room at a certain location in the hotel, away from traffic noise, on the 2nd floor, etc. I recommend TripAdvisor for reviews, they have an option where hotel managers can sign up and respond to guest complaints.
You get to see only a limited selection of the chain hotels that participate with RoomKey which doesn't replace the primary function of the OTAs which is to compare many different options at once (vs looking them up, checking each website, etc.)
No hotel will guarantee a specific room but with any booking engine you're able to put in specific requests in the comments area that the hotel will try and honor. To have the best chance of getting those rooms, you actually have to talk to the hotel around the time of room assignment (24-48 hours prior to arrival) so that they can actually do something about your request. Check out the floor plans and virtual views we've compiled at room77.com for ~3,000 hotels to get some specific room numbers to ask for.
Having floor plans available is a great idea! Unfortunately, I searched a few hotels, but was unable to find any. Do you have any example hotels, or am I not looking at the right place on the website?
Sure, here's the Omni California Hotel (https://www.room77.com/hotel-los-angeles-omni-los-angeles-ho...). We rank the rooms based on preferences that you set with the radio buttons at the top and we generate the views automatically using Google Earth technology. We recently added in the ability to look multiple directions from a room and see a stitched 180-degree version.
We have about 3,000 hotels for which we have floor plans and views for mostly in the US and over 16,000 that have unique "Insider Tips" about what rooms are best in a hotel. We search 200,000+ hotels so that content is a bit hard to find right now and we're working on exposing it more. We continue to add more content daily.
I love it! One thing I would like to see before booking a room are dated panoramic images of a typical room, so you have some idea of what to expect. It's not an easy problem though, since each room is different, and someone has to update all the info and verify. The layout and "Our Take" sections are awesome though.
We tried to do that early on and the problem we ran into was that as a metasearch, we're sourcing in rooms from many different sellers and each one likes to name their room selection something different. You add to this that some rates are "flexible" and you could actually get one of several types of rooms and we run into a matching problem.
Today, travelers can pick their seats on a flight or pick their cabin on a cruise but yet you're still not able to pick a hotel room for various reasons. If the industry moves to support this model, we'll be there with our room data ready and willing to integrate.
Also, the best method is simply finding out the hotel's phone number via Google or TripAdvisor, and speaking with someone at the hotel. This way, you can guarantee yourself a certain room at a certain location in the hotel, away from traffic noise, on the 2nd floor, etc. I recommend TripAdvisor for reviews, they have an option where hotel managers can sign up and respond to guest complaints.