When it comes to booking accommodation if you can be flexible on your dates and room options there is a good chance that you might end up paying less for your next hotel stay.
This is just one of several smart strategies that can help you get the best deal every time you need to organize your travel plans, and there are other tips to consider such as checking your email inbox regularly, taking a chance to get an upgrade, plus why a waiting game sometimes offers better rewards.
Playing a game of pot luck isn’t as risky as you think
If you have made your mind up that you want to stay at a specific hotel like the Manchester Marriott Victoria and Albert Hotel because you like it and it suits your plans, fair enough, but there is always the chance to gamble on your accommodation options if you want to save some extra money.
There are plenty of top hotel names who don’t want to own up to offering rooms at big discounts because they have some spare capacity, but there are a number of websites who offer these deals, although there’s a twist.
The hotels offer these rooms on the promise of anonymity when you are booking. This means that if you are searching a four-star hotel in a specific city you can make a blind bid at a heavily discounted rate.
The name of the hotel is only revealed once you have made the booking. Booking blind is not as dicey as you first think and you normally get enough clues in the description to work out that you will be probably be getting a lot of hotel for a lot less money.
Let the deals come to you
Not many of us like the idea of filling up our email inbox with a load of spam but there are good reasons for signing up for email alerts from hotels and travel companies.
When you check your emails on a daily basis you might just find an offer amongst them from one of your favorite places offering you the chance to stay at their hotel for a bargain price, or you could get a notification that the price of a flight you want has dropped.
It makes sense to use your inbox to have some of the best deals around sent to you rather than go trawling around the internet for them.
Playing your hand too soon can cost you
When to book flights and hotels so that you get the best possible price is a real dilemma for travelers.
The mindset is often that you need to get in early to bag the best prices, and that can be the case with airline’s, but there are no hard and fast rules as discounted airline tickets get released right up to departure time depending on demand, so you could wait and be rewarded.
The problem with that strategy is that if you need the flight you could miss out if the seats get taken while you are waiting for a better deal to come along.
When it comes to booking your hotel you might get handsomely rewarded for playing a waiting game.
Booking a hotel on the day you want to stay has plenty of risks attached as they might be fully booked and you will miss out, but if you are willing and able to wait until the last minute you could end up getting the room for anything up to 70% less than the standard rate.
Picking your days helps too. This last-minute strategy often yields the best result on quieter days of the week like Sundays and Mondays.