Hotel Best Rates Guarantee Promise Is Often A Hoax

Trump SoHo New York hotel

Hotel companies want you to stop shopping around. So why bother going to trivago.com, to agoda.com, to booking.com, to hotels.com, to expedia.com, to orbitz.com, to otel.com, to priceline.com, or to americanexpress.com and the many more available channels? Hotels don’t want you to compare rates, especially if you are a loyal member of their hotel group loyalty program, such as the World of Hyatt, Marriott Rewards, Hilton Honors, Starwood Preferred Guest, and IHG Rewards Club, among others.

As a matter of fact, hotel companies will threaten you NOT to book through what they say are “third party channels,” because if you do, your stay will mean zero points and zero status nights in the hotel loyalty programs. In order to reach an elite status with a hotel or airline, one needs to be loyal. Don’t make the mistake of being loyal to a brand and then booking through your travel agent, your meeting organizer, or one of the many known booking channels. You will never earn any status points that way, because your nights won’t count. So again, we ask, why bother even signing up for a hotel loyalty program?

Here is what hotel companies are advertising on their websites.

• The Lowest Rates Are on Hyatt.com
• Get Our Lowest Price, All The Time, When You Book on Marriott.com
• IHG – Choose from our great brands. Best Price Guarantee. Book direct now!
• We guarantee you always get the lowest price when you reserve a room through an official Hiltonbooking channel
• Best Rate Guarantee* If you find a lower qualified rate** within 24 hours of booking, we’ll match it – and give you a 20% discount or 2,000 Starpoints®

Sounds good, right? But not really. Here is the catch.

The following is a typical response you will get when shopping on a third-party website and find a sometimes significantly better rate.

First, the hotel doesn’t want you to book anything on the third-party website. What the hotel wants you to do is to fill out a lengthy form and ask for the “best rate guarantee.”

After you submit this form, it takes 24 hours for a response. If you’re at an airport trying to book a hotel for the same night, obviously, this “guarantee” will never work.

For a future stay, you most likely will get this response:

HYATT: “I am excited to hear of your desire to stay with us and your interest in our Best Rate Guarantee program. After researching, I was unable to validate your submission based on the Expedia screenshot that represents a “Private Sale Price of 59%, including a $100 Resort credit” which is a membership-only price package thus making it an invalid for the Hyatt Best Rate Guarantee. As indicated, the guest went to expedia.com and signed into the site, thus opening up the member pricing options.”

This means if you use a booking website, you are always asked to establish a sign-in. There is no cost to do so and no membership – it’s simply a username and a password. BUT, once you do this, then hotel companies consider you to be a “member” of that travel booking club, and there goes the option to use the hotel’s best rate guarantee.

In many cases, once you go back to the third-party website a day after the hotel has “investigated” and turned your claim down, you won’t be able to get that special deal anymore, because it has already been sold out.

Sometimes it pays, however, to be more firm instead of accepting this unfriendly hotel response. In the case of a Starwood Hotels and Resorts reservation, a claim to bring a nightly rate down from $280 to $89.44 plus receive a 20% additional bonus was honored, only after being threatened with a bad review on trip advisor, a filing with small claims court, and a letter to the editor.

This was the initial response by STARWOOD:

Thank you for your interest in the Starwood’s Hotels & Resorts Best Rate Guarantee program. It is always a pleasure hearing from our Gold members. I hope my email finds you well.

Please be advised that as per my understanding, I have processed the claim for a Premium room as originally booked. However, I request you to please mention the room type on which you want to get your claim processed in the New Starwood Room Type section in the future.

I have reviewed the rates for The Westin Las Vegas Hotel & Spa for the dates of your claim on our website and found a rate of $257.04 USD plus taxes and fees per night which is lower than the rate of $280.78 USD plus taxes and fees per night found on hotels.com. Since the rate is lower on our website, I am not able to approve your claim. To find the complete details of the Best Rate Guarantee program, please refer to our published terms and conditions.

So what happened here? Starwood looked at a higher room category on otel.com, the competing site. The claim was clearly for the lowest category, since the category names did not match on otel.com and westin.com, but this seems to be just another way to deny claims.

Here is the second response to this claim after it was first denied:

Thank you for your email regarding your Best Rate Guarantee claim for The Westin Las Vegas Hotel, Casino & Spa. I appreciate the opportunity to address your email.

After reviewing the claim, I show a room type was not listed on the competing website or our hotel website, and our associate processed the claim for the room type listed on the reservation.

Please know I have processed the claim once again; only this time I have processed it for the standard room at the hotel. Your claim has been processed for the traditional room.

I am pleased to advise your claim is approved. I was unable to locate availability for a Traditional room on our website, though I was able to locate availability on otel.com, which allows me to offer you the approved rate of 89.44 USD, plus tax and amenity fee, per night, and an additional 20% off the rate as requested.

My advice: Cancel the booking altogether and select an independent hotel that doesn’t play games with loyal customers. Travel agencies and tour operators should avoid brand hotels to not upset clients with a loyalty program or put pressure on those hotel companies to treat travel agents, tour operators, and meeting planners fairly.

Travelore Tips: 7 Goals For Better, Smarter Travel in 2015

Flickr / J Aaron Farr

This year, don’t just plan to check destinations of your bucket list. Resolve to become a better traveler. Here are seven travel goals to get you started.

Put social media to work: Before you book your flight or hotel, scour social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. You may be able to find discounted airline tickets, score miles or upgrades, and enter to win free vacations. Start with Twitter and Facebook and your favorite airlines, hotels, and related travel sites in the list of accounts you follow. You might even consider tweeting what you’re looking for in terms of price or needs — companies constantly scan Twitter, and one might just reach out with the deal you want.

Stop obsessing over reviews: TripAdvisor, Yelp, and similar websites can be extremely helpful when you are planning a vacation. We want to know that the photos on the hotel’s website are misleading or that most reviewers felt a museum was overpriced. But, by sticking to Yelp’s 10 highest rated Vancouver restaurants, you could miss out on the eateries where the locals go. Use reviews as a guideline, if you must, but leave some of your vacation to chance.

Read before you go: Guidebooks are great, but if you really want to get a sense of the country, read a book on its history, geography, or culture before you go. Don’t limit yourself to non-fiction offerings. Novels can serve as entertaining introductions as well. At the very least, do some online research before you go to learn about the capital city and major geographical points; the name of the local currency; what language (or languages) its people speak; and any unusual customs you should know.

Travel light: With baggage fees higher than ever, traveling light has become a necessity. This year, vow to pack only one versatile pair of shoes and to rely on color-coordinated separates that can be mixed and matched. Unless you plan to wear one on the plane and at your destination, ditch coats and opt for layers, and when packing, roll your clothes instead of folding them to squeeze more into your carry on.

Get lost: We understand wanting to make the most of your vacation time, especially if you don’t think you’ll have a chance to ever visit again, but don’t over schedule yourself. In fact, plan to get lost. Spend an afternoon exploring an area without an itinerary—pop in an interesting store, people watch from a bench in the plaza, spend an entire afternoon wandering through a museum.

Start a conversation: While you’re slowing down and taking in a new culture, make a point to talk to a local. Not only can you learn a little about the community and its people, but you may also hear about a restaurant you have to try or an off-the-beaten adventure worth taking. These experiences can take your vacation from “great” to “extraordinary.”

Give “braggies” a rest: There’s nothing wrong with posting pictures from your vacation online, but you can definitely cross the line with too many “braggies,” photos meant to make family and friends jealous. By all means, post the photo of your family in front of the Eiffel Tower — just maybe ditch the snaps of your every meal and the beach view from your balcony.

Contributed by Teresa Bitler

- See more at: http://blog.shermanstravel.com/2015/01/02/7-goals-for-better-smarter-travel-in-2015/#sthash.xu5zAegP.dpuf

Follow us on Twitter: @TraveloreReport

Travelore Tips: How To Take Advantage Of Limited-Time Deals

Contributed by Christine Wei

deathtothestockphoto.com

 we are always encouraging readers to take advantage of limited-time sales and last-minute deals — after all, alongside planning way in advance or looking to shoulder season, it’s one of the best ways to nab great discounts for travel. But the reality is that the best offers often require you to act fast, whether it’s a flash sale for travel five months down the road or for a cruise that departs in the next week. And more often than not, the pressure to book quickly can become overwhelming, and we find ourselves simply passing up the deal in the end.

But it can be possible to strike the iron while it’s hot — so long as you’ve already done a bit of simple planning. Having recently booked fantastically low fares to Istanbul during a three-day sale ourselves ($535 round-trip in the beginning of November), we wanted to share our checklist for what to think about beforehand. We hope that by working through these questions, you’ll be prepared to hit the book button and save big when the next deal rolls around.

1. Where do you want to go? 
These days, you’ll find deals pretty much every day and even every hour. It’s a lot for your brain to absorb, and often we end up scrolling through lists and ads without really reading. Which is why we’re fans of sitting down to write out a travel bucket list, either on paper or digitally, in order of priority. Not only does writing out a list flag the places you really want to go, ranking them will help you jump on deals for destinations high up on the list. Knowing you’ve already weighed them against the myriad other awesome places you could go saves you from making those comparisons all over again.

2. How much time do you need? 
This is pretty obvious to state, but again, thinking about this beforehand makes it easier to make a decision quickly. You need to know the minimum amount of time you should spend at each destination to make the trip worthwhile. We knew, for example, that we wanted at least five days to enjoy all of Istanbul’s historic sites, modern delights, and endless food. And we really wanted up to a week, really, so that we’d have a bit of time to get lost and wander. But had we been looking at a more familiar and closer destination or less active experience — say a luxe resort in the Caribbean — perhaps an extended four-day weekend would be enough.

3. How much time do you have?
As with all instances of travel planning, you also need to know the constraints in your schedule. If you’re working and have limited time off, keep tabs of the vacation days you've taken and have left. We keep a an Excel spreadsheet with columns for: destination; dates off; number of days taken for trip; total number of days taken this year, and total number of days left.

4. When can you travel?
Beyond a short booking period, limited-time and last-minute deals often also have a very specific window for travel. Make a habit of keeping track of dates that you absolutely can’t travel on — a weekend of a relative’s wedding, for instance — if you don’t already. We’re big fans of syncing our Google calendars across our desktop and mobile devices, so we can access our schedule from wherever we are.

5. Is the deal a really great deal?
It probably won’t surprise you that not all deals are as great as they might seem at first glance. That’s precisely why ShermansTravel has a dedicated Deals team — our Deals Experts spend their days sussing out every promotion that we might want to share with our savvy readers. When they’re assessing the value of a promotion, they typically look at a mix of the following: 1) how much the experience would cost from the same provider without the promotion; 2) how much the experience would cost through different providers, and 3) if it’s low season, how much would the experience cost in high season.

While you’ll likely have to do a bit more research when you’re interested in a specific deal, it’s not that hard, for instance, to figure out generally how much a ticket to Paris from your nearby airports cost. Once you know that, you’ll be able to evaluate a deal much more quickly. In our case, we already knew that flights to Istanbul can go well over $1,000 during popular months and still reach $750+ in slower months. So the minute we saw the $535 fare, we immediately started checking our calendars.

6. How much can you spend?
If you have a dedicated travel fund, good for you. If you don’t, you should at least know how much of your rainy day/leisure/other fund you’re willing to spend on travel. Even if the deal in question checks out and your schedule cooperates, in the end, nothing can happen without the exchange of dollars!

- See more at: http://blog.shermanstravel.com/2014/07/28/checklist-how-to-take-advantage-of-limited-time-deals/#sthash.X78g8bg1.dpuf

Follow us on Twitter: @TraveloreReport