Book Hotels Like the Travel Pros

I book like, 300+ hotel nights a year… because we live in hotels. Thus, I’ve gotten pretty good at finding hotel deals. But I thought I would give the step by step of how I prioritize what in the booking process.

This isn’t a hard rule I live by but more of a pattern. Allow me to explain how points, cash, BRGs, mistake fares, and the search engines fit into this. And in what order I look for them.

But first of all my philosphy for hotel booking is a bit different: It’s not based on the price of the hotel, but instead based on getting the highest amount of free nights out of my points. Actually, it’s more like this: If you took all the stays I needed over a certain amount of time, how could I spend the least amount of money? Period.

That’s the goal for me – spending the least amount of money. This dictates which points I use in which city, as I know relatively well what points I’ll need later. And in cheap cities with a good promotion, I think about earning. Because with 300 nights needed a year, I’ll run out of points. I for sure have enough hotel points for 3 months, not 300 nights.

But it’s the same concept scaled to how many points you have and how many points you need.

Anyways…

1) A Quick Look for Free BRGs

The first thing I do is check for BRGs on Kayak. If you don’t understand the concept, see my post on Hotel Best Rate Guarantees. The basic concept is that a hotel puts out a guarantee saying, “book with us and find a lower rate- get xyz.” First I look for the ones that say “get a free night.” If you’re curious about which hotels offer what kind of BRG policies, you an look at my Complete List of BRGs.

Kayak isn’t the biggest resource of BRGs but it does two things well 1) Searches by brand so I can instantly see all the InterContinental Hotel Group and Choice Hotels. It’s a matter of knowing my options. And 2) It does have different currency options, and I think both of these programs now need you to match currency to get a valid claim.

Understand that this isn’t the main thing for me. I give a quick glance because hey, free is free. But we only did 4 BRGs this quarter. So this is a know your options kinda thing. If there is something that I have to have, I chase it. This means also using Wego, Trivago, etc…

Really, I mostly search for IHG. I take free, but IC’s are a nicer free than Comfort Inns. I also check for free nights with Hilton if the room rate is below $50.

If there is none, I move on quickly.

2) Search Award Night Options

This is generally pretty easy as I know what hotel points I have off-hand (generally). Then I can use Kayak’s search by hotel option to plug in all the brands with which I have points and see what’s available.  Then I generally have to go directly to that hotel’s website to see the prices in points.

Personally, I’m looking for deals, like low category hotels and bang for buck… er, bang for points.

There’s not much to this. Since right now I have a lot of IHG points, I go to IHG.com and check rewards nights and browse the options.

3) Look for deals on cash stays

One site I used to enjoy a lot is Google.com/hotels for their “price compared to usual” search feature. Well, I still use it some but I liked it more when it had a percent to show you how good the deal was.

But really I’m most concerned about earning points from the stay. If we can use a Marriott BRG to discount it 25%, awesome.

We live on hotel promotions. Thus, looking for brand specific deals can be worth the stay. Like if you noticed on Carrie’s stats page, we got 34,000 points (not including a Big promotion) for one stay.

<side tangent>Though, you know what… I booked a bunch of nights to complete my IHG Big Win and I noticed on Carrie’s stats page that I’ve only been earning 4,000 points a night.

Crap. I forgot to register for all the promotions I talked about in the Earning IHG Rewards Points on Steroids post. So that was points missed out on, but whatever, I have three more stays needed. Good thing we now post all our spendings, points/cash. </side tangent>

Note that with IHG they give a free night for their BRGs, so this doesn’t earn points and set off promotions.

So sometimes I skip all the steps if I need to complete a promotion. Like we have two layovers in Dallas in the next month and it’s not enough time to go to town. Anyways, one of them is on a saturday and I still need a saturday for my big win. I don’t want a free night. I have 50,000 points on the line and I need to pay.

4) Full Circle – Always Book Refundable Rates

Sometimes I book a night, and then keep looking for a better deal with a BRG or points or etc.  Like with the IC Dusseldorf, there was a 1 night layover and there were really no good points or cash deals so a few times a week I’d look for a BRG and finally I found one, like the day before we left the states.

Similarly, I’ve waited to make plans for PointBreaks list to come out.

Still, I try not to obsess, or else you can go mad just booking a stupid hotel. Sometimes saving $10 bucks isn’t worth the hours, ya know?

5) Actually, I don’t always look for hotels… they find me.

Sometimes the decision is made for me.  For instance…

Point Sales

I always check certain deals. For example IHG PointBreaks is something I not only look for but long for. So when the last list came out, we were going to Paris in a couple of days. There was a Holiday Inn on the list for 5,000 points, so I booked that.

Similarly, they now do these flash sales. And when we knew we were heading up to Edinburgh with my mom, and the Holiday Inn went on sale there for 75% off (less than 9,000 points) it was a no brainer as well.

Sometimes the hotels are luxury hotels. When we were heading for Greece the IC went on PointBreaks.

Mistake Fares

Mistake Fares are awesome. Not just because I’ll be staying at a nice hotel for $10, but because it also earns me points. When you see a mistake fare (by following me on social media or because you’ve been a long time reader of the newsletter and can find them yourselves), jump on it. Ask questions later.

To eximplify my mistake fare habits… I’m just going to go ahead and be real honest here and show my calendar. This is my “mistake fares” section of my calendar:

In February we have mistake fares booked in Mexico, China and Peru all on the same week. In March we have Mexico, St. Lucia and London all on the same week. Obviously, I can’t keep all of them. Or sadly, maybe not any of them.

There are too many options at any given point in time so they end up over lapping. But my strategy is to book first, and then just go where I want. At the time I thought some of these sounded neat… but right now I’m really feeling an Asia trip. So I may be canceling.

But, if I so desired, I’m pretty sure I could spend all year flying around the world chasing mistake fares. At least I’d be earning points. But then again… I wouldn’t need them.

Maybe I should chase these rooms?

TMI with the calendar and all? Anyways, As you can see, we live this crap. It isn’t something I teach others to make some cash (I can prove that isn’t my motive :-p), this is not only our hobby, but our lifestyle. Even mistake fares alone we could live on…

Don’t have a way of getting old newsletters to you at the moment, but hang tight. And in the mean time, sign up.

Conclusion

BRGs might be first on my list, but they are a small part of my list.

The majority of our nights are:

1. Reward Nights – by far
2. Paid Stays – usually points-earning motivated
3. Mistake Fares – depends on the month or where we feel like going.
4. BRGs

1 is by far our main source of nights. 2 and 3 are neck and neck. 4 is very far behind.