I am sure we all like a good deal and saving money especially when I personally get to do what I love the most, travel. As I am planning a weekend away in London every few days I will check hotels and see if there are any good deals. About a month ago I got a good price on the Andaz in London but closer to the day and as I have a ton of holidays planned this year I decided to try and create a tighter budget.Now, I give myself some crazy low price figure which I try to achieve, it is like having a competition with the industry and trying get the best price possible. Sometimes I win sometimes the industry wins. This weekend’s crazy budget I had was £150 for a 5* weekend in London with first class train. I was not sure how I would do this but today out of the blue I managed to do it.
I discovered few tricks over the years and I will show you the 4 steps I take every time which has saved me money.
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Step 1
My first step is to always check the chains that I am a member of currently this will be Hyatt, Hilton, IHG and Club Carlson. London is extremely expensive and usually I will try to use points instead of cash for expensive cities. London requires many points and I didn’t want to give up so many of them as I have stays coming up in New York soon which is equally expensive and I can use them there. The Andaz I had booked was £140 a night which is a reasonable price and if it had a lounge I would have probably kept it.
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Step 2
This is where it becomes interesting. I always go to TripAdvisor first and input my dates. TripAdvisor is an aggregator and it will show you the prices from various websites. I will narrow down my search as in London there are 1000+ hotels. I will narrow by hotel and usually price, for example 5 star hotel for less than £100. Then I will see the prices that it shows from the various websites. Last year I managed to get a deal on the Hilton hotel in Malta for £200 for three nights instead of the £550 that was requested by Hilton. Plus as Hilton honors statuses, even if booked via a third party I received an upgrade and lounge access. This was a total saving of at least £350.
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Step 3
I will check the best price suggested by TripAdvisor. Many times they only show 3 or 6 OTAs and the rest are hidden, I ALWAYS open the box as there are times I have seen 70% reduction in the prices that were not shown. This was the case with my Hilton Malta hotel. The OTA I booked it with was showing the price on TripAdvisor it was just covered in the 9 more options; the small print on the webpage.
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Step 4
I will check the cashback websites and see which one offers the biggest savings. There are times you can save up to 15% of your hotel booking just by going via a cashback route. On top of any other saving you might receive. I always check Lowcostholidays.com, Travelpony.com and Orbitz as I have seen great offers and deals there. I love these less known OTA as they do provide genuine savings rather than your typical Booking.com which I barely use. You can always use wikipedia if you want to find other OTAs too that might work for you.
The hotel I booked in London today was using the method explained in the steps above. I managed to book it for £73 with breakfast in Marble Arch with 4 out of 5 TripAdvisor reviews, instead of the asking price on Booking.com for £200 with breakfast. This for me was a real saving! Yes it took me about 20 minutes to complete the whole process and check all sites but it does work. I am pretty happy with the deal and the real cash I saved!
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Ameena
Salam what does OTA stand for? Also, what points programs do you use?
Muslim Travel Girl
Salams Ameena,
Thank you for stopping by. OTA is short for Online Travel Agency, sites like Expedia, Kayak etc.
With regards to points, as I am in the UK I use, Avios, Virgin, Etihad and KLM points mostly. 🙂
jamila
Salams Elena,
Which site did you end up booking with?
also, I’ve seen you mention travelpony credits before, can you tell me what that is?
Thanks