What’s the Best Way to Get a Deal on a Hotel?

Should you visit a discount site to get your hotel deal or the hotel’s actual website?

If you’re traveling for any length of time, one of the biggest expenses you’ll encounter will be your housing. Even if you’re going for inexpensive options like hostels or one-star establishments, even those accommodations can have surprisingly high price tags.

Finding a great deal in a hotel is a help whether you’re in pursuit of a luxury hotel stay or a bare-bones hostel. There are very few people in this world who can throw money into a vacation budget without having to think about the overall total, so knowing where to find deals can mean the difference between an affordable vacation and a heartburn-inducing swipe of your credit card.

In most cases, finding the best rate on a nice hotel room will come from completing a few different searches on different websites and figuring out how a particular hotel prices its rooms. Some hotels may price their rooms cheaply according to the season. Others might price their rooms according to the platform you use to book the room.

The important thing to remember here is that there’s no single best way to book a hotel room and get the best rate all the time. I tend to use an aggregate website where I get a percentage off on my booking fees in return for frequent use of the site. But the cheapest rate isn’t always offered on that website.

Let’s take a look at some of the places you’ll want to look to find the best hotel rates for your next vacation.

(note: some of the links here are to websites with which I am an affiliate, and your purchases help fund my website!)

Don’t Just Use One Aggregate Hotel Booking Website

Since I’m an affiliate of Expedia and their family of websites, I do tend to provide links to hotels I’ve stayed at through their different websites, and visiting a site like Expedia, which is an aggregate website that cobbles together the rates for different hotels in one space, is one great way to find cheap rates on hotel rooms.

However, I’d be remiss if I suggested that you only need to use one website to check out different rates. In fact, it’s not just Expedia that allows you to compare rates for different hotels. Even though you’ll often find sales and deals through Expedia, other websites are great, too, for comparing things like user reviews.

I often find myself settling on a particular hotel only after I’ve read about it on a few different websites. I may have visited the official website of the hotel, as well as explored what some reviewers have had to say about the hotel on sites like Expedia and booking.com.

Google is another good resource for getting info about potentially great hotels, but I’ve found that Google reviews tend to go negative way too often. People seem to just visit Google to complain, and it’s not usually the cheapest place to find deals anyway. Yes, sometimes you’ll find deals on Google, but I usually cast a wider net after doing some initial research on Google.

Exploring the Official Website is Always a Good Idea

Virtually every property out there will have its own website unless you’re thinking about a site on Airbnb or VRBO. Anything under a brand name, like Hilton, Sheraton, or any other chain out there, will have an official website for the property you want to visit. This is where you can find a lot of the most accurate information about the property.

Interestingly, it’s also where you want to check if you encounter a “sold out” listing on a discount website. Sometimes, a hotel will only list a few of their rooms on a big website, just to get their property listed on the website and made available to search engines. However, they won’t make all of their rooms available on the website.

I’ve encountered this with a few different properties where it’s always – ALWAYS – sold out on aggregate websites, but rooms are always available when you visit the actual official website of the property. And it’s not just a room or two that’s available. It’s a ton of rooms that you can choose from on the official website, provided you’re not conducting your search at the last minute. Sometimes you’ll even find this with plane tickets, too.

If I had to guess, some websites probably take a little too large a slice of the profits from the hotels when their rooms are listed, so they only make a small portion of their rooms available just to make sure they get those rooms in front of more eyeballs. You have to wonder whether making their rooms seem sold out all the time is worth it, though, when people might not realize the rooms are actually available via the official website.

Call the Property for the Best Rate

In many instances, calling the property directly will get you the best rate, the best room, and the best overall result for your booking. You can’t always get the exact room or amenities you want when you book on a website, even if you use the official website for the property. If you’re looking at staying at a little property in the middle of nowhere in Colorado, make an effort to call the property directly.

You may find that bypassing the internet and just speaking to someone on the phone directly will get you a much cheaper rate, as well as ensure you get the room you want, whether that’s something with a view or a unit that’s not facing a busy street.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve checked out of a hotel and had the proprietor or whoever’s working the desk hand me a business card and tell me to call the hotel directly the next time I want to book a room. It will almost always be cheaper for the hotel to talk to you directly to book the room rather than use a third-party site.

Now, I understand that you can score some deep discounts by using various websites, and by all means, you should always go for those discounts when you can score them. But you may also want to give the hotel a call right before you book just to see if they can offer you an even better rate and help you avoid unnecessary spending. Who knows, they might actually beat the website’s rate and still earn more from your stay than they would if you booked online.

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