Recent Hotel Tonight Experience
Last week I shared with you how I love to travel “On The Fly” and how I am taking a trip with my son at the last minute. Saturday night, as our train from Los Angeles was only about an hour outside of Seattle, I finally booked our hotel for the night.
I have written about my Hotel Tonight experiences before and reviewed the app as well. For those who don’t know, Hotel Tonight is an app on both iOS and Android which allows you to book hotel rooms on the same day as check-in at a discounted rate. This service is not for proper planners, but rather for procrastinators like myself or those with last minute plans.
A few days ago after looking at the hotel point redemption options in Seattle, I made a decision to pay cash for a hotel in lieu of using points since it wasn’t a good value. While I wasn’t committed to using Hotel Tonight, I knew that I had some credit with them, so I used the app as part of my search process. (You can get a $25 credit towards your first booking with the code: SCOOMER2 ).
We did end up booking a room at the Belltown Inn in Seattle on Hotel Tonight. The process of booking and checking in with the hotel was both smooth and painless. It was pretty much inline with my other Hotel Tonight experiences.
Waiting To Save Money
The real reason for this post is to share something that I noticed while waiting to book. Around 11am when I fired up the app and searched for rooms in Seattle, a few hotels downtown were going for $109 per night and some were higher. Around 2pm, the Belltown Inn appeared at $89. (It may have appeared between 11am and 2pm at a higher rate, but I didn’t see it.)
At this point I was debating between a slightly nicer but more expensive option or the Belltown Inn, so I didn’t book. When I casually checked the app again around 3:30pm, I noticed the Belltown Inn was down to $79. After telling Shawn Reece that I would wait an hour to book, I did other things only to discover the hotel was down to $69 by 4:30pm.
Shawn Reece urged me to book, but I postponed it another hour. Just as we were sitting down to dinner shortly after 5:30pm, Hotel Tonight had the Belltown Inn for $59 with a warning that there was only “1 Room Left”. Of course, I waited no longer and booked right away.
I am assuming the hotels have the ability to go in and manually set/lower their price. My guess is that someone at the hotel was lowering the price to make sure the room was filled.
In the end, waiting saved me $34 including taxes over the original price I saw. (Most hotel booking sites had this room for $149-$169 for the night so I saved even more if you look at it that way.)
Not all hotels lower or change their prices over the course of a day on Hotel Tonight, but I have seen it happen with Vegas hotels as well. I am not advocating that people wait to book with the hopes of prices going down, but it is a good idea to pay attention to hotels and their prices when you look just in case you check back later.
Most of the hotels in Seattle had static prices and didn’t change. This one was aggressive with their pricing and filled their room. Hotel Tonight worked just as it should have and I am happy about that.
Hotel Tonight Experience – Conclusion
As always, Hotel Tonight offers $25 credit towards your first booking for new signups with the code SCOOMER2. If you use the SCOOMER2 code, I also receive a $25 credit after your first booking. Every member has their own referral code, so use whichever you feel comfortable with. If you use ours, thanks for the support.
Either way, this was yet another great Hotel Tonight experience where I saved significant money. I always use it as a tool in my hotel searches and suggest you do to. It is just one of many tools, but a darn good one.
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