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  Hotel Strategies

Hotels 101: Get the Best Deal on Your Hotel Room outlined some straightforward strategies for saving money on hotel reservations. If you are willing to invest some extra effort, you can sometimes get an even better deal.

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• Earn additional rewards
• Paying the lowest net cost, factoring in rewards and promotions
• Best rate guarantees
• Purchasing the points you need for your hotel reservation
• Other tips

Earning additional rewards for your reservation

With a little extra effort, you can get earn additional reward points (or cash back) from your hotel reservation (above and beyond the standard rewards from the hotel's own loyalty program and the awards you earn from your travel credit card). Earning extra rewards is essentially the same as getting a discount on your reservation.

• If you are booking a room at a chain hotel, you can almost always take advantage of a special promotion to earn additional reward points. There is usually some sort of promotion available and you can often stack together multiple promotions to earn even more points. The best single listing of available promotions is available from the Frequent Flyer Bonuses website.




• Third-party travel booking sites (like Expedia, Agoda, and Booking.com) sometimes offer special promotions that provide discounts on their regular rates. You can typically find deals that give you 10% or 15% off any hotel reservation. Occasionally, you can find even better deals such as $50 or $100 back (which can sometime work out to a free hotel night at a less expensive hotel).


When one of these travel sites is running a particularly good promotion, you can save money by booking with them, rather than directly with the hotel or via Hotels.com.

• The best source of information on current promotions is a Wiki maintained by FlyerTalk. Since not everyone can add a code directly to the Wiki part of the discussion board, it can be worthwhile to also check some of the latest posts.
• Otherwise, you need to rely on searching the listings on the general-purpose “promotion code” sites like RetailMeNot, Coupon Cabin, or the coupon section of Groupon.

Unfortunately, the listings on these sites include a lot of clutter. Many of the listings are just the normal “sales” that booking sites offer, in conjunction with hotels, to help sway where you stay and just show up as part of the normal search results.

In addition, the promotion code websites don’t provide any way to quickly view what is available across the different travel websites—you need to check each site’s offers individually and you are likely to miss promotions from sites you don’t normally think about.
• You can usually get extra rewards by taking advantage of a shopping portal. Shopping portals give you bonus rewards when you shop at hundreds of different online merchants. All you need to do is visit the shopping portal first and click on the link to the hotel company or travel site where you want to book your room. The Shopping Portal gets an “affiliate fee” from the travel site and kicks-back some of that to you. If you are taking advantage of a discounted rate, you won’t necessarily get anything back from the Shopping Portal, but you might as well try on every reservation. .
• Sometimes, you can pay for your room with discounted gift cards. During sales, you can buy gift cards for hotel chains or travel sites at discounted prices, such as 20% off. If you use them to pay for your reservations, you are effectively getting an extra discount on your room. You can often find discounted gift cards by searching eBay or Amazon. Unless you are sure you can use them, we don’t necessarily recommend stocking up on cards. But it is worth a quick search to see if you can find some at the time you are ready to book a specific hotel.

Taking advantage of different discounts and promotions can add up. For example, let’s say you are booking a $150 hotel at Hotel.com and they are offering a 15%-off booking promotion. The room rate will be $127.50. If you can find hotels.com gift cards at 20% off, you can pay for the room with only $102 worth of cards. You’ll get back the equivalent of $12.75 credit from the Hotels.com loyalty program and up to 7% back (worth $9) by going through a shopping portal. Maybe you earned $5 in credit card rewards from buying the gift cards. If so, the net cost works out to only $75.25, about half the normal price of the hotel. However, in practice, many Hotels.com promotions preclude you from having the stay count for Hotels.com's loyalty program. So, you can't always combine all these discounts and rewards on a single reservation.

Paying the lowest net cost, factoring in rewards and promotions

The sophisticated travel booker compares the net benefits of booking through different websites, taking into account the room rates, the rewards they can receive, and the promotions that they can take advantage of.

• Much of the time it comes down to choosing between booking directly or using Hotels.com. Is there a great promotion with the hotel’s loyalty program? Do you expect to be able to take advantage of the points you’ll earn from the hotel’s reward program? Is there a current booking promotion and/or discount gift card deal from Hotels.com?

• Sometimes, it is worthwhile to book through a different 3^rd party travel site. Hotels.com has the best of the travel site loyalty programs. But perhaps there is a great booking promotion at Orbitz. Or you can take advantage of a lower rate or Best Rate Guarantee at some other website.
• Sometimes you are better off using a specialized site that gives you a bunch of frequent flyer miles for booking a hotel reservation. When you book with Rocketmiles, PointsHound, or Kaligo, you’ll typically get thousands of frequent flyer miles for each hotel reservation. With each site, you can choose which type of reward points you want to earn. For example, for a recent reservation at the W Chicago Lakeshore, Rocketmiles was charging the normal "best available rate" of $186 but offering 4,000 bonus Alaska airlines miles, valued at somewhere around $60.

When you factor in the value of these miles, this can be a better deal than booking a slightly less expensive room rate on another website. Consider Booking with Bonus Mile Booking Sites to Get Thousands of Miles.



Taking advantage of best rate guarantees to get bonus savings

Most hotel chains offer “Best Rate Guarantees” (BRG). In most cases, along with matching any lower price you find, the hotel or travel site will give you an added bonus such as an extra $50 off.



The catch is that the lower rate needs to be a publicly available rate and every other aspect of the reservation needs to be identical. For example, you can’t match a member’s only rate, a “private deal”, a rate where you used a discount code, or a rate you found as part of a package.

Because it is hard to find price discrepancies that would qualify for a Best Rate Guarantee, we usually don’t recommend actively searching for Best Rate Guarantee opportunities.

But if you ever run across a lower publicly available price on a third-party site than on the hotel's own site, you’ll have an opportunity to get a great deal on your room.


Use Best Rate Guarantees (When you Can) to Get an Additional Discounts on Your Room Rate

Other tips

• You might be eligible for a corporate discount. If you work for a larger company or are a member of another large organization, you could be eligible for a corporate or organization rate. Before the next time you need to book a hotel room, check the policies at your company. In many cases, you can use the company booking tool or a corporate booking code for personal travel. Alternatively, book over the phone and mention the name of your company.

Corporate rates are especially attractive when hotels are charging higher than normal prices during periods of peak demand. Negotiated corporate rates are typically much more consistent across dates and can be much cheaper than the regular rates when prices are high.

At other times, corporate rates may be less attractive. For example, at the W Hotel in Seattle, the regular flexible rate for a mid-week stay in the spring was $237. Marriott members had access to a $232 rate and AAA members could have gotten a $225 rate. A typical corporate rate (Microsoft’s) was a bit less expensive at $219. However, anyone could have booked a non-refundable rate of $201 instead and Marriott members could get a lower non-refundable rate of $191.

• If you occasionally stay at hotels for longer periods of time, get the Citi Prestige card to take advantage of its "4^th night free" benefit. Citibank will refund the cost of your 4^th night at pretty much any hotel. If you tend to make a few longer hotel stays each year for ski trips, beach vacations, family visits, medical care, work, or other reasons, this can be a lucrative benefit. Get Your 4th Night Free with the Citi Prestige Card.

Hotels 101: Get the Best Deal on Your Hotel Room

Consider Booking with Bonus Mile Booking Sites to Get Thousands of Miles

TravelStrategies:*Advanced Hotel Booking Strategies/Page