How to book hotels for less
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If you’re looking to book a hotel for a short break, work or even just a night out with friends, it’s always worth considering how you can cut the cost of your stay.
Follow my top tips and bag a bed for less.
1. Do your research
Finding the right hotel takes up the majority of my time when I’m booking a trip. It’s important to get it right so I use a good guide book or website to locate the area I’m going to stay in and then a comparison site to start checking prices and to get a feel for cost.
To create a shortlist, I check reviews and the facilities of the hotels I am considering, ensuring the hotel is accessible using public transport or has parking if I’ll be in a car. If driving, I also check if there are any parking costs, always looking for free parking or places I can park at no extra cost nearby.
2. Shop around
Once I’ve drawn up my short list, I look for the best price online. However, this can be confusing when so many companies sell hotel rooms, so, to keep things simple, TravelSupermarket’s hotel tool will find rates from more than 50 companies for more than 420,000 of the world’s hotels in one search.
I then check the best results for me to see what is included and what is excluded, such as breakfast. If you stay regularly at a hotel, ask if you can get a preferred rate the next time you visit and always sign up to email alerts from comparison services and hotel chains for sales. You can then get in quickly when price reductions are launched.
It is also worth checking the hotel price direct to see if you can find a better deal cutting out any middle men. Sometime it works and sometimes it doesn’t, however it’s worth the effort when you make a significant saving.
3. Consider pre-paying
Many hotels will offer a pre-pay rate for early bookers which is non-refundable, as well as a rate that allows you to make changes and cancellations for free if you need to.
If you take the former (which is usually lower in price), ensure you have travel insurance to cover you for any cancellation outside your control, such as illness, and remember that in the UK most travel insurance policies are only valid if stays are two nights or more.
4. Consider alternatives
Low-cost budget hotel chains, such as Premier Inn and Travelodge, may not always show in price-comparison engines, so check those before making your final choice. You should also consider apartments, especially in big cities, and if you’re travelling in a group. They are an excellent way to cut costs and our searches now feature many of these.
Hostels can be a great cheap alternative as are university rooms outside of term time – especially useful in places such as Edinburgh during the Festival.
More recently, Airbnb and couch surfing have become popular alternatives as ways of saving money if you don’t want the services of a hotel.
5. Secret hotels
Another way to cut costs is to opt for “secret hotels”. You’ll know the star rating and the features of the hotel, as well as the approximate location, before you confirm your reservation, but you won’t know the actual hotel you’ve booked until you’ve paid up.
You can often get some amazing bargains this way, especially in the summer months in big cities, but be warned that once booked you can’t usually change the reservations. Lastminute.com and Laterooms are reliable sources for these.
6. Hotel food and drink
Unless your breakfast or any other meal is included in the hotel rate, you can avoid racking up costs at your hotel by shunning the food and drink on offer. While the quality on offer may be good, the prices are nearly always on the high side, if not actually extortionate.
I usually head out to a local café, bar or restaurant for my food, to benefit from greater choice, a chance to see more of the place I am visiting, and better prices.
If you’re tempted by room service, be aware it often attracts a service charge, so avoid this at all costs if you want to keep your outlay down. Additionally, I take food, snacks and drinks such as water with me from home or buy them from a local supermarket.
7. Don’t touch the mini bar
And when I say touch, I really do mean touch. Many are set up so that even if you pick up an item it registers a charge. And if you really can’t resist that midnight Mars Bar or bag of crisps, nip to the newsagent in the morning to replace it for a fraction of the price you’ll pay on check-out.
8. Check wi-fi costs
One of the most important things for me is to have internet access when I travel, so I now search for this as part of the hotel deal I book. Increasingly, many hotels offer this for free in some form. However, UK hotels in particular seem to be geared up for ripping us off with wi-fi costs.
Instead, use your own contract or pay as you go rates on your mobile phone (be careful when overseas as you can quickly rack up costs), or use free wi-fi hotspots in the hotel if they are on offer. Alternatively, you can find local cafés and bars with free wi-fi to update your social networks, check your emails and surf the web for no cost at all.
9. Laundry
I once spent £5 a pair to have some underwear cleaned in a hotel in Buenos Aires. I still can’t believe I actually paid it. It would have been cheaper to head to the nearest shops and buy some new items.
I now use local dry cleaning services at a fraction of the cost if I need something cleaning urgently. And, while travelling, I have used local launderettes. I found one in Berlin with a café and wi-fi while I was there for a few days, so I not only got my washing done cheaply, but could enjoy a cheap breakfast and surf the web while doing it.
10. Max your spend
Many hotels offer points for staying through airline mileage schemes or hotel membership schemes. These schemes do add up, giving you free nights once the points mount up. However, always consider these as a benefit and not the reason for booking in the first place.
And, of course, if you want to use points up to book hotels for less, check the value of your redemption to make sure the offer is good value for money versus paying from scratch. In my opinion they are usually very poor value and not the best way to get a deal.