Extra Hotel Savings
As a savvy hotel deal hunter, you must have seen lots of advertisements like “Save 25% or more”, “Get up to 60% off”, etc. from various travel booking sites, including our partner vendors – Expedia, Hotels.com, Priceline, Agoda and Booking.com. Indeed those travel agencies can save you money, if you don’t mind making a payment before knowing the hotel’s name or have a lot of flexibility in lodging location and date. The hotel savings that we are talking about here are an EXTRA 5-40% on the top of whatever the savings you can get from our partners.
Optimal Rates of Single Hotels
The basic idea is to split a multi-night stay into several reservations. You may ask, “Does that mean I have to switch hotels?” Not necessarily. The technique works on both single hotels and multiple hotels. “If it is in the same hotel, do I need to move to a different room?” you may have another question. The answer is no. When you check in, just inform the front desk that you have multiple bookings. The hotel manager will merge your bookings and keep you in the same room. Why? Because moving you to a different room creates more trouble at the service desk, uses more cleaning labor and wastes more room supplies.
Here is a real example in my life. If I had booked this hotel near Boston with one reservation, I would have to pay $950 in total. Instead, I booked the first night with one reservation and the rest 4 nights together with another. My total payment became $632. It’s the same hotel and the same room. I saved $318 immediately with this simple technique.
Hotel Hopping
Flexibility is the key in hotel savings. If you don’t mind switching hotels in the middle, you will have chances to save even more with “hotel hopping”.
Hotels in similar conditions in the same area may have very different prices. Some hotels charge more in weekdays than weekends because they are business oriented. Others may be the opposite because they accommodate more leisure travelers. If you can take this advantage and stay at the right hotel at right night, you will be a big winner.
There are actually several other benefits of hotel switching besides saving money. First, you may experience different hotel designs and services. Second, sometimes your ideal hotel doesn’t have vacancy for multiple days in a row. Booking nights separately allows you to stay at that hotel in the days when it is available. Last, you have a chance to earn more rewards points if the hotel calculates points by number of stays instead of number of nights. If you don’t have much luggage and spend most of your time outside the hotel anyway, it is worth to check multiple hotels.
How It Works
In fact, it is already not a secret that you can save money by booking nights separately. Many smart travelers have used such a strategy for years. But are they really able to get all the rates and figure out the best solution manually?
Let’s say you need a hotel for 7 days and use an online booking site to check rates. You can book each night separately. It means that you need to check the booking site 7 times to get the price at each night. Alternatively, you can book two nights together. In that case, you need to check the site additional 6 times: night 1 and night 2 together, night 2 and night 3 together, and so on. To get the rates of 3 nights together, you need to check the booking site 5 times. So on and so forth. To get all possible rate combinations, you have to check the booking site 7 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 28 times. But those are just rate combinations. The real solution is a combination of 7 nights with any of the above rate combinations, e.g. 2 nights + 3 nights + 2 nights.
Very often you want to check many different hotels. Number of combinations will grow exponentially. Very quickly you will have thousands of possibilities to test. Even if you are a genius and eventually work out the answer, you will find the original rates have changed when you are ready to click the booking button. Do you want to start from the beginning again?
Extra Hotel Saving Solution
The good news is that FindOptimal can do all of the above for you in several seconds. First, FindOptimal offers “Optimal Rate” at single hotels when you have a chance to pay less by splitting your stay at the same hotel into multiple reservations.Second, FindOptimal can help you to find the best hotel combinations. All you need to do is defining the date range and selecting hotel candidates, if you’d like. FindOptimal will retrieve all the rates, create all the combinations and calculate the best solution for you. Furthermore, you can limit the number of hotel switching to a certain number, set up your own switching cost, and request the hotels not too far from each other. All those requirements will be respected during the optimization.
Ready to give it a try? Here is the multi-night stay optimization process.