Which engine to use to search and book your hotel and how to search for cheap hotels

Before discussing this topic, I would like most people to be aware of certain points.

1- Never book your vacation in a rush or under pressure. Hotels sometimes use scare tactics to provide a sense of urgency. For example, Booking.com shows how many rooms are left, which might be accurate, but take it easy and make sure you get the correct deal.

2- There are certain review websites that compare the prices of hotels on different search engines to tell you which one has the cheapest hotels. That is utter bollocks. All online travel agencies (OTA) websites provide a price match guarantee, meaning if you find a hotel room cheaper at another website, you can contact your website and ask them to provide you with the cheaper price. Considering that all the variables are the same such as the dates, number of people, the days of stay, and the room type are the same.

3- Interface is essential for the search to be as simple as possible, but searching for the cheapest room is the most important factor. It is very easy to use the website with the simplest interface and then go back to the one with the best loyalty rewards and book there.

In my opinion, the most important thing to look at when trying to book your hotel through an OTA is what loyalty rewards you get from that website.

Rest assured, I am aware of websites such as Airbnb and hostelworld.com. However, from my experience, if you are traveling as a couple, getting an entire apartment from Airbnb in large or popular cities or during festivals can be the same price as booking a hotel. In comparison, hostels are more for the younger generation. Furthermore, neither of those two websites offer any loyalty benefits, and thus I will mainly concentrate on famous hotel websites.

Hotels and Loyalty programs

I will provide a brief overview of the three famous booking websites and one cryptocurrency website.

1- Booking.com has the genius program, which offers a 10% base rate discount at the genius level 1 and a 15% base rate at genius level 2. I think that was the first website I used and, in all honesty, although there were more hotels available than other websites, their loyalty program is absolutely useless. If you use trivago.com, you can see that you can easily get these rates without being a member in any of the websites. It is as if they increase the price (since Booking.com is quite expensive) in order to give the false pretence of a discount (fake sales trick).

2- Expedia.com is a points-based loyalty program where you earn 2 points for every 1 euro spent on hotels and 5 points for euro spent on flights. The points are doubled when you book through the Expedia app. If you are a Silver member, you will earn 10% more rewards, while a Gold member will earn 30% more rewards. Getting a silver status involves booking 7 hotel stays or spending an equivalent of 5000 euros, while the Gold member requires 15 bookings or 10000 euros spent.

The sad part is that you require 140 points to get a 1-euro reward. In other words, if you were to book a hotel through the Expedia.com app, you would need to spend 35 euros to get 1 euro back, which is equivalent to a 3% discount on your booking.

3- Hotels.com is owned by Expedia Group Inc and before my introduction to the crypto travel industry, this was my favourite website to make my bookings on. The loyalty program on this website is very simple; you book 10 nights and get one night free. The one free night consists of the average of the 10 nights booked. So, if you book 10 nights for 100 euros each, you get one night for 100-euro. This is equivalent to a 10% discount on every night. Similar to Expedia.com, they also have a silver and gold membership, however, the silver requires 10 nights of bookings, while the gold 30. From personal experience, the gold is not even worth it; you barely see any difference between it and the silver.

The caveats for this program are that you cannot combine several free nights to pay for an expensive night. So, one day is equivalent to one day booking. The second is that if you have a free night worth 100 euros and your hotel costs 95 euros, and you wish to use that night, you will lose 5 euros. Make sure you do not use a discount coupon with your booking unless it is a 10% coupon, as this will not be counted towards your 10 nights. Also make sure to redeem your free night via the app, as the website will charge you a small fee.

I would also like to advise people to have accounts in cashback or loyalty reward websites, like swagbucks.com, in order to get a further 2-4% cashback.

One of the problems with the latter two websites is that you are not able to get cash in hand. Meaning that you cannot sell expedia.com points for cash, nor the hotels.com free night. The only way possible would be to redeem the benefits for a friend or company and then pay you back in cash.

4- Travala.com is my new favorite. I speak about it in my other article. Basically, it is also an OTA that is trying to improve the travel business for both hotels and consumers. The reward program is shown below, and as you can see that in order to get these benefits, you need to hold a certain amount of their native token, which you can get from websites such as Binance.com or from their own website. Unlike the other websites, you can always cash out your tokens in Binance.com, although it is a longer process with less fees on the way. Or you can cash them out as travel credits that, unlike the other websites, do not expire. You get 24% on your AVA token holding (till a maximum of 5000AVA), with 12% in AVA, while the other 12% in travel credits. You also get extra discount, depending on your smart level.

How does one get the best deal?

Step 1:

Determine how much you would like to pay for a hotel stay and the type of hotel you would like to stay at (5 star, 4 star or no star) and book in advance.

Step 2:

Use a booking website such as Hotels.com, to get an idea of what the prices are on the days of your choice.

Step 3 (optional):

I usually take a look at the hotels’ prices on weekdays, to see just how much of a difference there is compared to weekends (how overpriced the hotels are on the weekends). If they are stupendously different, I rethink my vacation (going on weekdays instead of weekends).

Step 4:

If you already have your eyes on a hotel and are afraid it gets fully booked, then make your reservation, but make sure you choose the “Refundable” option at first. Please be aware of whether taxes are included or not.

Step 5:

Usually, I go to Booking.com to do another search, since the website has a greater number of hotels; maybe I might find something better. I also look at the prices, but from experience, I know that Hotels.com usually has the better prices.

Step 6:

Go to websites such as trivago.com and search for the hotel you just booked. Now look at the lowest price and which websites offer them. One website where I sometimes find better prices is Agoda.com

Step 7:

Make sure that the stay and the hotel details are the same.

Step 7a:

Sometimes different websites have different names for the same room. These changes can be as subtle as changing the order of the name, making the website you request the price guarantee refusal because it is not the same room. Your job is to make sure that the rooms are similar. The solution will be discussed later in step 11a.
Step 9:

Ensure that the prices for both refundable and non-refundable option are cheaper (in the new website).

Step 10:

This is something strange that happened twice, but since it happened, I do it and advise people to do it. Go to expedia.com, if you are in Europe or any other country, change the region to United States and language to English and check the price of the hotel you are staying at (if available on the website). Rarely, the price in dollars is cheaper than the price in Euros (even after including taxes).

Step 11:

Here it is important to know whether you are going off-season or in-season. From experience, when you are going in-season, as the dates of your vacation comes closer, the prices for accommodation increase while the opposite is true for off-season bookings. However, that is not the case for all locations. For example, in Amsterdam, I realized it was weekday and weekend that determined the price and not the season.

It is important to determine whether you will keep your refundable booking and ask for the price match guarantee, or cancel your refundable booking, and book the non-refundable option and ask the price guarantee on that.

If the price difference between refundable and non-refundable is very small, then it’s best to keep the refundable one, just in case.

Step 11a:

If the room name on the site with the cheaper price is not similar to the site you are using, and you are confident that the rooms are the same, then go on an online chat. Here you should ask the customer help desk to contact the hotel to confirm whether the rooms are the same. If the rooms are the same and it is just a naming issue, then you will get the lower price.

Step 12:

If you are confident and know you are going during an off-season and that the prices will decrease with time, then perform an initial price match guarantee on the refundable booking you currently have. Afterward, repeat the previous steps a couple of days before the booking and a day before the booking. If you find the price cheaper, do another price match guarantee, but this time determine whether you want to do the price guarantee on the refundable or non-refundable ticket. At that point you can always go for the cheapest option (non-refundable).

Step 13 (Bonus):

When booking a hotel, make sure you are registered in a loyalty or reward website, such as Swagbucks.com. These websites provide cashback on the amount of money you spend (excluding taxes). For example, if you book a hotel through websites such as Expedia.com or Hotels.com, you get a 2% cashback.

Step 14 (Bonus):

I am sure most people are already doing this, but just in case some of you don’t know, don’t forget to book using credit or debit cards with cashback such as crypto.com debit card, swipe card debit card, amazon credit card and so on.

These are the tactics I use for booking my hotels. I hope you find them useful

Good luck and enjoy.

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