Carmen
Travel editor at Reisedrop · 2026-09-11
Try this: ask any chatbot what a hotel in Mallorca costs in July. You'll get an answer in seconds – nicely worded, with a price range that sounds perfectly plausible. And then comes the sentence that gives it all away: "Prices and availability may vary – please check on a booking site." Wait. If I have to check it myself anyway – what was that answer worth?
Where does a chatbot get its prices? From memory.
A language model like ChatGPT has no booking system behind it. It was trained on huge amounts of text – websites, articles, forums – and by the time you ask, those texts are months to years old. When you ask for a hotel price, the chatbot doesn't query a database. It generates a number that statistically fits your question. That's not looking something up, that's estimating – brilliantly worded, but still a guess. That's why the answers sound so confident and are still non-binding.
"But the chatbot can search the web, right?"
True, many can nowadays. But even with web search, the chatbot finds prices from random websites – often cached, without your exact travel dates, without your number of guests, without the room category you want. It sees a snapshot, not a bookable rate."
Hotel prices change faster than you scroll
Hotel and flight prices are dynamic: they depend on occupancy, season, remaining allotments and demand, and they sometimes change several times a day. Last night's price can already be wrong this morning. That's exactly why any answer without a live query at the moment of your search is, strictly speaking, outdated – even if it happens to be right once in a while. For popular destinations in high season, two days can easily mean a 20 or 30 percent difference.
The biggest catch: you can't book anything in a chat
Even if the estimated price happens to be right – in a chatbot, the journey ends with the answer. You have to leave, search yourself, set filters, and usually find a different price than promised. The supposed shortcut becomes a detour: first ask, then do everything yourself anyway.
How Zazou does it differently
Zazou, the smart travel companion on Reisedrop, answers the same question differently – not because it chats more cleverly, but because it works differently. The moment you ask, Zazou queries our partners' real booking systems: hotels and flights, with your dates, your number of travellers, your preferences. What you see is the available live rate – with photos, real availability and a book button. No "approximately", no "please check yourself". Two clicks, one price, zero stress.
And if the price drops later? That's what the Drop Alert is for
Because prices do fluctuate, you can set a Drop Alert on any hotel on Reisedrop – with or without an account, an email address is enough. If the price drops or falls below your target price, you automatically get an email. That way, price dynamics work for you instead of against you.
Fancy exactly this? Zazou, our travel assistant, puts flights, hotels and a route together in seconds - and tells you honestly when it gets cheaper.
Plan this trip with Zazou