I benchmarked seven hotel price APIs on the same Rome room, and the prices were 16% apart because of tax

I benchmarked seven hotel price APIs on a single room in Rome and discovered a 16% price discrepancy among them, primarily due to tax differences. The investigation involved three separate queries each, using the same stay details: check-in on 2026-11-20, check-out on 2026-11-23, for two adults in one room, with USD currency. The searches were conducted at Lisbon, using a named hotel called Hotel Artemide in Rome, from both US and German servers, and through free tiers.

The APIs compared included SearchApi, HasData, SerpApi, FlightPowers, Apify voyager/booking-scraper, and Xotelo. The results showed significant differences in their pricing methods and whether they included taxes in the price. For instance, HasData listed the price as $914.64 plus $142.12 tax, while StayAPI, when queried from the US, showed a total price of $914.64 without tax and $1,061.71 with included tax.

SearchApi provided a price of $915 without a specific tax field, and FlightPowers, when queried from the US, showed a price of $1,057.

The key takeaway was that the API used and the market it sourced the price from significantly impacted the final price. StayAPI's total_price field indicated the price before tax in one market and after tax in another, highlighting the importance of normalising prices to a single tax-inclusive total for accurate comparisons. The cheapest options were found through SearchApi and HasData, while FlightPowers had the highest cost due to its tax-inclusive pricing method.

The investigation concluded with a reminder to standardise tax inclusion when comparing hotel prices across APIs.