When you search for a hotel, most of you these days have a few deal-breaker requirements. For me, it’s an elevator—I’m an old geezer and don’t do stairs very well—but it can range from a kitchen to being pet friendly. And you can save time and hassle if you can limit your search to hotels that meet your needs, without cluttering up your response list with places that wouldn’t do no matter what the price or other features. To cater to that need, almost all hotel search engines include filters that allow you to exclude those unwanted responses. I checked eight top hotel search systems—Booking.com, Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, Kayak.com, Priceline.com, Tripadvisor.com, and Trivago.com—and although they all use filters, each uses a somewhat different set of filters.

The Basics. All eight include some basic filters:

But I found some differences in treatment of what I figured might be among the more important deal-breaker features for most travelers:

Specifying a filter for a feature as available but not saying “free” doesn’t mean it isn’t free; just that free isn’t promised.

All eight systems provide additional filters and detailed subcategories of the most important filters. Trivago employs fewer filters than the others, and Booking is possibly the most granular. A few provide filters that leave you in the dark: Expedia and Hotels let you filter for “LGBTQ friendly,” for example, without indicating exactly what that entails. Of more importance for most travelers is the detail they can add into such categories as “accessible” and “property type.”

Hotwire and Priceline remain the only two online agencies that offer an “opaque” pricing option: In exchange for a big reduction, the agency selects the hotel and doesn’t name it until after you’ve made a nonrefundable payment. Given the high fees, opaque buying isn’t as useful to bargain seekers as it once was.

You clearly have your own set of necessities and deal-breakers. I suggest that you take a look at all of the systems to see which best accommodate your individual needs and preferences. If possible, however, use all that work; Prices and promotional deals do vary among them.