Extra hotel rewards

  Hotel Strategies

Everyone should already be taking the relatively simple steps to earn rewards on their hotel reservations by using a credit card that earns good rewards on travel spending and earning points with the hotel's loyalty program (when possible). When better rates aren't available elsewhere, booking through Hotels.com Rewards Program is a good way to further boost your rewards.

If you are willing to invest even more time and effort, you can usually earn extra rewards on your hotel reservations. These extra rewards effectively lower the cost of your stay.

It's not that hard to take advantage of any of these additional rewards option. The reason we consider them "advanced strategies" is that it takes extra work to investigate what is available from each of these different options and factor the different possibilities into your hotel booking decision.

Does a particularly good promotion mean you should pay a higher price to book through some other site? Is it worth giving up the hotel's own loyalty points and benefits to book through a third party channel? Do the extra rewards available for a hotel switch your decision of where to stay?

We already recommend that you search a hotel booking aggregator like Kayak.com, one or two "private deal" websites, and the hotel's own website for most hotel reservations, as well as the Luxury Travel options and/or Hotwire whenever they are appropriate. Not everyone wants to take the extra time to evaluate a bunch of additional options. But if you do, you can often get an even better deal.

Jump to

• 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

Shopping portals

One of the easiest ways to earn extra rewards on your reservation is to book through a "shopping portal". When it is time to book, rather than going directly to the hotel's or online travel agent's website, visit a travel portal first and you're likely to some additional cashback on your reservation.

Most online merchants, including some travel booking sites and hotel companies, pay "affiliate fees" for websites that send them customers. Shopping portals collect those fees and refund some of the money to you. For general information about shopping portals, see Earn extra rewards using Shopping Portals.

• When booking directly (except at Hyatt), you can usually earn 1-5% cashback. Most hotel programs participate in shopping portals. However, cashback rates tend to be fairly low.
File:MarriottCashback.jpg
• At Hilton, you'll earn a lower cashback rate if you book as an elite member. They figure that the portals don't really deserve much credit for sending them their own elite customers and pay out lower fees.
• You can usually earn around 4% extra cashback when you book through Hotels.com and Hotwire. Extra cashback for Hotels.com reservations is usually higher if you choose not to participate in Hotels.com's loyalty program, but you are almost always better off accepting the lower rate and earning the additional 10% from Hotels.com.
• At other online booking sites you'll usually earn an extra 3-8% cashback. Unfortunately, there isn't a convenient way to compare rates across each of the many sites where you can book. In any event, these rates aren't usually high enough to cause you to move away from booking directly, through Hotels.com or Hotwire, or through some sort of private deal website.
• There are always some additional terms and conditions. To be sure, you'll need to check the fine print on the shopping portal site. For example, with Marriott, you won't earn cashback on AAA rates, gift card purchases, or stays at some excluded hotels. Our strategy is usually not to bother. We just book the reservation through the portal and hope that we wind up getting some extra rewards.
• You'll only receive the rewards sometime after you've completed your stay. This avoids the need to claw back your rewards if you cancel your reservation.

Hotel promotions

Hotel companies are constantly running promotions—you can get special rates on hotel rooms, bonus points for your reservations, or occasionally free night certificates after completing a couple of stays.

It doesn’t cost anything, except a little bit of time, to take advantage of seasonal hotel promotions. In the most extreme cases, you can combine several different promotions to earn more in bonuses than it costs to book the room in the first place.

With many hotel promotions, you'll need to register for the promotion before a certain deadline, even if you have more time to stay at a hotel.

Learning about promotions

• The best website for finding loyalty program promotions is Frequent Flyer Bonuses. They have a page for every hotel program, even many of the less popular ones, and a fairly comprehensive list of promotions for each program.

• Loyalty Lobby provides more information about special hotel rates and sometimes lists promotions that are missing from the “frequent flyer bonuses” website. It can be worthwhile to look at both sites. Make sure to click on the “Hotel Promotions” menu on the header to get to the pages focused on each of the major hotel programs.
• Frequent Miler is a good alternative if you want to see just the main promotions from each of the major programs.
• Sometimes, offers are targeted to specific members. Some hotel promotions are available to everyone, but other promotions are only available to specific people who have received a targeted promotional offer.
• If you want to find out about targeted promotions, you’ll need to agree to receive promotional emails. You can’t always rely on the websites above. Tips for Managing Promotional Emails.

Making a mattress run to take advantage of a particularly good promotion

• Promotional offers are occasionally good enough that it can be worthwhile for you to book a room, even when you aren't interested in staying at a hotel. For example, with a “stay twice, get a free night” promotion, if you can use the free night to get $200 in value on an upcoming stay and you can book a cheap hotel for $60/night, it is worthwhile to spend the $120, even if you don’t need the room.

• To get credit for your stay, you’ll usually need to check-in to the hotel (although you don’t necessarily need to spend the night there). If you don’t check-in, you won’t receive the promotional benefits, even if you still get charged for the room. It’s not fair, but it's the way it works. If a promotion is particularly worthwhile, it can be worth contacting the hotel's general or sales manager and see if they are willing to check you in "remotely", so you don't need to actually visit the hotel.
• With some programs, you can get credit for more than one hotel room at the same time. However, if the promotion requires different “stays”, you can’t just make two different reservations on subsequent days, check-out, and then check back in again. The hotel will count back-to-back reservations as a single stay.

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.



Other

• You can often earn some extra rewards by booking through a shopping portal. Regardless of whether you are booking direct with a hotel chain or through a third-party booking site like Expedia, you can often earn an extra 2-8% back on your reservation by using an online shopping portal. To earn your extra rewards, you’ll need to visit the shopping portal and navigate to the reservation website, rather than going there directly. .

Shopping portals let you “triple dip” on your hotel reservations—earning rewards from the shopping portal, your credit card, and the hotel’s or booking site’s loyalty program.

• Elite members of various airline programs can earn miles for some of their hotel stays. This is on top of whatever hotel points they'd be entitled to. American elites earn 1 mile for every dollar spent at Hyatt, Emirates elites earn 1 Skyward miles for every dollar spent at Marriott. China Eastern elites earn 2 Eastern miles for every dollar spent at Marriott.

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

Hotels 101: Get the Best Deal on Your Hotel Room

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

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