The Google Image trick that can save you over £1000 on holiday accommodation

You might be shocked how much the cost of a holiday rental can vary across different platforms — and this is an easy way to check

It’s common knowledge that shopping around usually gets you the best price. But with holiday cottages, villas and other short-term lets often listed on many sites across the internet, it can be difficult to know if you’re getting the best price.

Googling the property's name doesn’t always help – as we show below, cottages and villas are sometimes listed on different sites under different names or worded slightly differently. You could also look up the address, but many sites, such as Airbnb, don’t release a property's address until they’re booked.

That’s why the quickest, easiest way to cross-reference listings across the internet is by doing a reverse Google image search on a picture of the property. 

Using the tip, we found savings on three properties in the UK, Spain and Portugal — including a huge £1,335 saving on a four-bedroom Portuguese holiday home.

Read on to hear more and to learn how to do the trick next time you’re booking a holiday home.

How to reverse image search your next holiday home booking

Just select a photo of the property – picking the ‘main’ image that shows the front of the property works best – and long-click. A menu should display after you’ve clicked, with an option to ‘Search Google for this image’, or if you’re on a Safari browser, ‘Look Up’. 

If you prefer, you can instead save the image or screengrab the page. Then, go to Google and click the camera shutter icon in the search bar – this will lead you to a Google Lens page where you can upload the photo or screengrab from your camera roll. Google Lens also works if you point it at a picture in a magazine and use it to capture a photo of what you’re looking at, meaning you can even compare listings in magazines and catalogues to online prices.

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How much we saved using reverse image searches

The biggest saving we made using this trick was on a four-bed villa in Portugal. It was listed as Villa Corcovado on a site called Oliver’s Travels, for £4,369 when booked from 26 August to 2 September.

But when we reverse-image-searched it, we also found it listed as ‘Quinta das Laranjeiras’ on a Portuguese website called Algarve Holidays, booked for the same dates for just £3,067. That’s a saving of £1,302. 

We also found a villa in Malaga, Spain, listed at around £475 cheaper on Airbnb than on the host’s own website. 

The trick works for UK cottages, too, which are usually listed across several platforms and sites. For example, we found a cottage listed as a ‘Romantic coastal rural retreat barn near Hartland’ for £912. But the same dates on the host’s own website cost £700, with a booking fee of just £3, bringing the total down by £209. 

Just remember, listings may differ across platforms according to refund policies, check-in and check-out times, and any extras included or excluded, so make sure it’s like-for-like or that you’re happy with any differences before booking.