Hotels.com Amex Offer Expiring
Following the holiday season things tend to dry up in the Amex Offers realm. Thankfully though the well isn’t completely dry. In doing my typical Monday morning browsing of Amex Offers, I stumbled across a great deal that is expiring tomorrow. I have known about this offer for a month, but sort of put it on the back burner. Now, it’s time to take advantage.
The Offer
The Hotels.com Amex Offer is as follows:
Get a one-time $10 statement credit by using your enrolled Card to spend a minimum of $50+ in one or more transactions online at www.hotels.com/giftcards by 2/28/2017.
Ninja Tricks for More Savings
Right off the bat that is pretty good at a 20% discount, but it gets even better than that. Top Cashback is offering 2% back on gift cards as well. This means you will end up paying $39 for a $50 card. That amounts to a discount of 22%!
Then, the offer is made even better by two other things:
- Hotels.com Rewards gives 1 free night after 10 nights stayed.
- Hotels.com pays 3% cashback (current TCB rate) for bookings when also using the above rewards program.
For example on a $100 stay you would pay $80 for the cards and receive $5 in cashback total. Essentially you are getting a 25% discount and also receiving 1/10 of a free night. Not bad at all!
Loading the Offer
This offer came out on January 30 and was/is available on the American Express website. It also is available via twitter by tweeting #AmexHotelsDotCom. Thanks to my Twitter automation I have it on quite a lot of my cards!
Reselling the Gift Cards
Hotels.com gift cards can potentially also be profitable to sell given the overall discount. For example, some companies (depending on your bulk relationships) may buy these for about 81% of face value. Not a huge profit, but it might be worth it for some. If you don’t have any bulk reselling relationships, then these cards probably won’t work to resell.
Conclusion
I think for most people this is a fantastic offer. It isn’t often that you can lock-in a 25% savings on hotels, especially since you aren’t stuck to a specific brand. Given the overall discount plus Hotels.com Rewards, I think this is one to take advantage of if you often pay out of pocket for hotels, but remember a lot of chains don’t honor elite status on 3rd party stays.
What do you think? Is this offer worth jumping on before it expires? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card
Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card is the old king of travel rewards cards. Right now
bonus_miles_full
Learn more about this card and its features!
Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.
Today is a little late to be trying to buy these cards — I purchased one on each of my Amex cards yesterday and the purchases are still pending… if they don’t clear tomorrow, the rebate won’t happen.
Strange. My cards have come instantly.
FWIW, none of my GC purchases tracked via TCB. I’m a pretty regular TCB user and thus accustomed to the site’s quirks– but none of my nine purchases from Hotels.com even went to “pending.” I guess I could always file tickets for them… but that’s kind’ve a lot of work for nine bucks.
Same.
Same here. The site for gift card purchases would sometimes open up a new browser window but I tried pasting that link into the browser window opened by topcashback and still had no luck getting purchases to track.