Today I am determined to answer a seemingly simple question: Do all hotel booking engines quote you basically the same price for a given hotel room, or are there big discrepancies in the prices you can end up paying?

A newsletter to which I subscribe recently provided a link to a hotel booking Web site called hotels.com. Although it appears very popular, I hadn’t used it before, so I decided to see how it stacked up against those with which I’m more familiar.

Usually I check out Travelocity, Expedia and Ratestogo for ideas. If I become interested in a specific hotel, I check for deals on that hotel’s own Web site, and, before making any bookings, read the traveler’s reviews on tripadvisor.com just to be sure the place isn’t a real stinker. It’s a bit time consuming, but, thankfully, we haven’t ended up anywhere too awful in the past couple of years.

With the upcoming President’s Day long weekend in mind, I decided to see how quoted costs for booking a two-night stay for two adults in a standard double room, from Feb. 16-18, would stack up against one another. I came up with the following results by checking each and every Web site on the same date, Feb. 5. When rates were quoted in other currencies, I used www.xe.com to convert them to the U.S. dollar equivalent. Here’s what I came up with:

So is it worth it to do a little homework before making that final booking -- the answer does appear to be that yes, sometimes a little extra work of the fingers on the keyboard will pay for itself. Not feeling up to that yourself? You can always use a Web site such as www.sidestep.com or www.nextag.com to make those comparisons for you.

Curious as to some new arrivals to the travel-related Web site scene? You might find USA Today’s New generation of travel planning websites grow up worth a read.