The budget of any trip is significantly dependent on hotel prices. Therefore, BlogoItaliano decided to deal with this in detail: how to reduce the cost of housing as much as possible. And it will not be about choosing hotels with fewer stars, the location is not clear where or the ability to steal slippers. These are working methods that can help anywhere., and which we regularly use ourselves. Each of them was checked manually. And here is what we did.
Off season is much cheaper
If you are keen on traveling during peak season, be prepared for high prices. But planning a trip to the off-season or "off-season", you can save a lot. For example, I regularly fly to Greece in October. During this period, the sea is still very warm, the weather pleases with an abundance of sunny days, and hotels with their prices.
Here is an example of price screenshots from Booking.com the same hotel in Nafplio (Greece). The first - from August 29 to September 4 and the second - from October 17 to October 23.
Prices at the hotel from August 29 to September 4
The number of nights is the same, but the price difference is more than 70 Euros.
Prices at the same hotel from October 17 to 23
Moreover, with a high degree of probability, the weather in October will still be very pleasant.
Try checking the hotel directly
When the first exploration of prices is done, we can go further. The easiest option is to go to the hotel’s website and check the price there. It happens that directly on the hotel’s website you can take the same number cheaper or some analogue that is not in the reservation system. It happens that the prices are the same, but on the hotel’s website an additional compliment is mentioned in the form of, say, included breakfasts.
But even more effective may be a call directly to the hotel. Especially if the duration of your stay is not 1 or 2 nights, but a week or more. In this case, which is especially typical for small family hotels, the owners are willing to meet them and are ready to discuss discounts. This approach works especially well during the off-season and “off-season” when there are not so many guests.
See the same incognito hotel
Hotel systems may well remember what a particular user is interested in and “raise” the price when they return. Also, the pricing policy can sometimes be different for those guests who view the hotel inside and outside the country.
Finally, I don’t know some airline ticket services about hotels, but you never got caught on the fact that they even changed the pricing policy depending on which operating system the user came from.
Part of these tricks can be fought by checking the option you like in normal mode and then switching to incognito mode. This feature is available in many popular browsers.
How to switch to incognito mode
Traveling with a big company - ask for a discount
All hotel owners, especially for small ones, primarily entrepreneurs. And they are better off losing marginally if they feel good compensation on volume.
Therefore, traveling a large company, it can be very beneficial to make a separate call to the hotel you like and ask for a discount for the "bulk order".
Use hotel aggregators
There are many hotel systems, and such a popular and convenient booking.com is just one of them. In different systems, prices for the same hotels may vary. And sometimes these differences are very significant.
To be sure of the best price, it’s worth punching the selected hotel through an aggregator and see if the conditions are better. In the Russian-speaking space, this method of comparison is most successful implemented by hotellook. The system pulls data from more than 70 reservation systems, and therefore often manages to save well, very significantly.
With our first example, we are lucky. The price of booking and hotellook turned out to be identical, since the selected hotel was presented only in booking and there was nothing to compare.
With our first hotel in Greece, the price was identical
But to visualize the possibilities of saving, I decided to repeat the search in Rome on the same dates for 6 nights. And now, offhand, one of the results that turned out:
The price difference for the same hotel in Rome per week is almost 250 Euro
As you can see, even for an inexpensive three-star hotel, the savings only for the 1st week of accommodation in this particular case will be 250 Euros. So why pay more?
With an increase in the amount of the check, the savings can be much more substantial. Here, for example, is an option for the same dates where the benefit is almost 600 Euro.
For expensive hotels, the price difference can be even more dramatic.
Check hotel prices for dates can be here:
Book with the possibility of cancellation and follow the price
Since we are talking about hotellook, then you can use one more small trick to reduce the price. As a rule, the system gives the lowest prices when paying in advance and without the cancellation option. If it is possible to cancel the reservation without loss and payment on the spot, on the contrary, room prices are often higher. But the cost of rooms does not stand still and can eventually both rise and fall.
Hotellook has a whole range of tools to significantly save
It's a shame if today you booked a room, say, for 500 Euros, and after a week you saw that its price dropped to 400. What should I do in this situation?
If you have in stock a few weeks or months before the trip, you can book a room with the possibility of cancellation and right there sign up for price changes at this hotel the subscription form is right under the prices, as in the screenshot below.
You can subscribe to price tracking directly on the hotel page
The system will begin to track price fluctuations, and if it changes, it will send you an email notification. Then you can losslessly cancel the previous reservation and make a new one - more profitable.
If the price does not change, then right before the trip you can cancel your refundable reservation and make a new one - without the possibility of cancellation if it is cheaper.
Consider an apartment alternative
At hotels, the world did not fit together and very often, especially in large cities, you can find a worthy alternative in the form of apartments. When traveling abroad, the most popular solution is airbnb, which contains perhaps the largest private housing base with daily rentals around the world.
I myself use this site regularly and periodically record video reports about the most interesting housing. Often apartments can give odds to any hotel. I described my experience with the service in detail in this article.
Moreover, for those who have not yet used Airbnb, there are discount vouchers in the system. The amount of the discount may change over time, but the actual voucher for your first trip you can always get here.
That's all for now. If it was useful, share it on social networks.
