When trying to find a nice hotel in an area you’re not familiar with, go back to the basics and find the address on an online mapping service, like Google Maps.
Their satellite view will tell you a lot about where your hotel is located, what’s around it, and — potentially — what to watch out for.
You may find a hotel that looks great on their website is actually in an area surrounded by warehouses or in an abandoned area of town.
When making reservations for a hotel stay, don’t assume all booking companies (i.e., Expedia vs. Travelocity) are created equal.
If you book a hotel one month with one agency and then book the same hotel again the next month with a different agency, don’t assume the terms and conditions for refunds or changes will be the same. Oftentimes, cancellation fees and refund policies differ from company to company.
Always verify any important conditions such as deposits, refunds, service fees, and fees for changing a reservation. This will ensure that when you do travel, your hotel stay will be smooth and you will limit the unexpected surprises that could possibly ruin your stay.
To save money while staying in a hotel, forget about the vending machines and room service. Instead: pack snacks.
Before booking a room, check to see if the room is equipped with a mini-refrigerator. If it isn’t, bring a cooler packed with ice. Put things inside it like cans of soda and bottles of water, fruit, cheese and sandwiches. You can refill the cooler with ice from the ice machine in the hotel. After all, there’s usually an ice machine on each floor directly across from the vending machines.
The money you save on snacks can be spent at restaurants and area attractions!
Whether this is your first time at a hotel or you are a regular, you should always be a member of the chain’s loyalty program.
There isn’t a charge to join and – with your very first stay – you start gaining points. Points can be used for free nights and other perks. Some programs (like Hilton Honors) will even let you exchange points for miles in airline programs.
Members of the hotel’s loyalty program also have a better chance of getting upgrades, so make it a habit to join the program.
Normally, I’d think that a website inviting hotels to beg for bid on the insane and detailed requests of travelers would be a nonstarter. But, we’re in the middle of a brutal travel market recession. And, this decade has been awful for airlines and hoteliers alike. So, if the industry is going to learn any lessons from this turbulent decade known as [well, nobody really figured that out what to call it], the first should be that it needs to make a regular practice of going every extra inch to pull in a new guest.
So, the success of new business LetMeGo.com, which will create a marketplace in which travelers can indicate the specific amenities they want – from bunny slippers to cheese plates – will depend on whether the travel and hospitality industry has figured out that it will always be prey to a fickle economy. If the service providers in the hotel business realize this, they will understand that the extra effort is necessary, even when the travel market is on fire.
Using LetMeGo.com’s website, which is still in beta, companies peddling hotel rooms, vacation homes and other forms of lodging will be able to view the itineraries posted by prospective guests. They can bid for the affections and dollars of these travelers, with this data being used by the traveler to make a decision. The process is completely transparent to the participants – every bidder can see each other’s bids, and the user, of course, can sell all bids on his itinerary. But, it isn’t open to the public, as nobody needs to know what you’re looking to spend on your vacation. Since everyone can see each other’s offer, there’s incentive to cut further to attract your interest cash.
According to VentureBeat, “a good number” of lodging companies have signed up for the service and there’s already an affiliate program in place to drive traffic to the site. Could this be the future of the hospitality business? I can think of worse. If the site takes off, it will be easier for hotels to identify exactly what their guests want, deliver on it and use it as a way to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market.
So, the future of winning online travel cash will involve head-to-head competition, with everything out in the open. If I were one of the competitors, I wouldn’t be thrilled about this, but there’s no better experience for travel buyers: it’s designed to help us win.