Seven Tips To Score Travel Deals On Social Media

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Travel providers lure social media stars with special perks, discounts and freebies nowadays. Check-ins on Foursquare or Facebook, tweets, retweets and Instagram posts are traded as currency in exchange for loyalty points or discounted rates. In most cases, the more followers you have, the larger your reward. But even an everyday traveler with a less-than-impressive fan base can leverage tweets and likes to save money on travel.

Many of these influencer promotions come and go. Last year, American Airlines gave complimentary airport-lounge passes to passengers with high Klout scores. In 2012, United ran a promotion bestowing airline miles upon Foursquare users who checked in at airports. Official tourism boards often run limited-time offers on sites like Pinterest and Facebook; follow your favorite destinations to keep an eye out. For the best offers that you can use now, I've focused on active promotions, many of them permanent (or at least semi-permanent) loyalty or reward programs that compensate social media activity.

Foursquare freebies

Foursquare, the location-sharing app that allows users to virtually check in, blast their activity to friends and trade tips about visited spots, is a terrific resource for travel coupons. Businesses around the world, from hotels to restaurants to attractions, offer discounts or perks via the app. (Users are awarded points and special badges for check-ins; discounts are often offered to those with points.) In the past, airlines have offered lounge access to avid Foursquare users. Although big-ticket Foursquare promotions from travel providers aren't as common today as they were a few years ago, there are still deals to be snagged. Right now, for example, Boston's Midtown Hotel offers free parking and Wi-Fi to guests who check in with Foursquare. Discover more up-to-date offers for various destinations by using the search tool on the Foursquare website or app.

It's important to note: Be careful about sharing check-ins on Foursquare when traveling. As a rule, it's unsafe to divulge up-to-the-minute location-based data on social media. You don't want the world knowing that your home is unattended and that you're on vacation. Use your Foursquare privacy settings wisely.

Starwood's SPG program

Starwood's loyalty program SPG offers Starpoints for enrolled travelers who link Facebook or Foursquare pages with their Starwood accounts then post check-ins to Starwood properties. You can redeem your Starpoints for hotel stays, flights, merchandise and other stuff. There are a lot of strings attached, though. To get the points, your property must be offering a special check-in promotion during your stay. You can't book through a third-party booking engine such as Expedia or Orbitz; those bookings don't count as "eligible stays." And sometimes you might need a confirmed reservation to get the points -- it all depends on the specific promotion. Check Starwood's Facebook or Foursquare pages to see what kinds of check-in promotions are available.

Marriott Rewards Plus Points

The social media angle of Marriott's rewards program is very similar to that of SPG. Connect your rewards account to your social pages, perform a "qualifying social action" (known to humans as a tweet or a Facebook or Instagram post), and earn points. Marriott Rewards points can be redeemed for stays at Marriott properties worldwide. Marriott has a handy little chart that tells just how many points a person will get for each post. A social check-in on Facebook, for example, is worth 25 points. Guests can even earn points for retweets, likely destroying any illusion of authenticity in the realm of personal social media accounts. If your Facebook friend begins obsessively posting about Marriott using the appropriate corporate-approved hashtags, you'll know why.

Kimpton Karma

Through Kimpton's new rewards program Karma, hotel guests can earn points for room upgrades, free stays and other perks by spending money at Kimpton properties -- and also by Facebooking or tweeting about Kimpton. It's a free program, and members get complimentary Wi-Fi and a $10 minibar credit during each stay, so it's worth joining whether you're a social media user or not. Unfortunately, though, Kimpton rewards for social media activity are not exactly guaranteed. Though Kimpton says you "might earn some additional Kimpton Karma love" through social media shout-outs, no real promises are made. And no language in the loyalty program's terms and conditions states a quid pro quo of points for posts. I get the feeling that having large numbers of followers will up the likelihood of Kimpton taking notice of your posts.

Hotelied

Here's the premise behind just-launched booking site Hotelied: "Taste makers" -- folks with heavy social media followings -- receive customized discounts on hotel stays. Hotelied does the dirty work by negotiating cheaper rates for online influencers. You link your social media accounts to the site, and Hotelied asks hotels to give you reduced rates based on your popularity. The company's website puts it plainly, if tactlessly: "Hotelied recognizes the fact that not all travelers present the same value to hotels and provides hotels with a platform to specifically target and customize their offerings to their most desirable traveler segments." The notion of straight-up linking customer value with social media clout is disturbing; apart from that, Hotelied might make some sense for travelers who spend a lot of time on sites like Twitter or Facebook. The largest discount available is 50%, yet Hotelied doesn't specify how many followers a person must accumulate before getting half off a stay.

The 'Instagram Hotel'

The 1888 Hotel in downtown Sydney is known as the "Instagram Hotel" thanks to the property's willful spotlight on the culture of snapping and sharing, in addition to the tangible rewards it offers social media connoisseurs. Its well-designed guest rooms are clean, graphic, and picture-perfect—ideal for Insta. Guests with more than 10,000 Instagram followers are eligible to receive a complimentary overnight stay, and Instagrammers who share property pictures tagged #1888hotel are entered to win a free night. If you like being the center of attention, this really is your place. 1888 has a "Selfie Space" with a special backdrop in the lobby. Give your selfie the hotel's signature tag and your image will appear on a screen near the reception desk. Smile and say "me"!

Tweets as tips when the bellhop is a robot

You might run into a waist-high, screen-faced robot gliding around the halls of Silicon Valley's Aloft Cupertino Hotel. This robotic bellhop is called Botlr. Botlr accepts tweets as "tips" when performing menial tasks like bringing snacks or a toothbrush from the front desk to a guest room. Although Botlr doesn't care how many followers you have (for now, at least), the robot embodies the newfangled social-posts-as-currency model. You'll even save a few bucks by tweeting via Botlr's touch-screen face instead of having to hand actual money to an actual working person.

Contributed by Caroline Costello, SmarterTravel.com

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New Push To Make Paying Full Price for A Hotel Room Passé

One traveler paid $130 for a room he had seen for $147 at the Bahia Resort Hotel in San Diego, shown, by bidding through Stayful.com. Bahia Resort Hotel

When Craig Foster needed a place to stay for a March trip to San Diego, the best rate he could find for the Bahia Resort Hotel was $147 a night. Then one website he tried, Stayful.com, said it would bid $130 a night for him.

Sure enough, the hotel immediately offered him the room at the reduced rate. That amounted to a savings of just over $100 for his six-night stay. "It seemed a bit too good to be true," Mr. Foster, an accountant from Mill Valley, Calif., recalls thinking at the time. "But it did the job."

Paying full price for a hotel room may be going the way of the bellhop or front-desk ledger. Stayful is part of a fresh crop of technology startups that are offering new ways for travelers to book rooms at significant discounts to prices listed on hotel websites or on online travel agencies such as Expedia.com.

While strategies vary, these sites typically find a way to negotiate a deal with a hotel below the listed rate, or they keep an eye out for price cuts, then help rebook at the lower rate. In almost every case, the websites collect commissions from the hotels while charging the travelers nothing.

The tech world has angled for a piece of the hospitality business practically since the birth of the Internet. The first major wave of online travel companies started nearly two decades ago. Sites like Expedia and Booking.com provided price comparisons across numerous brands to book airline tickets, hotel rooms and car rentals. That was followed by Priceline and Hotwire, which offered deep discounts for hotel stays for anyone willing to use an opaque process: Travelers don't see the hotel they have booked until the transaction is completed and can't be changed.

This new group includes HotelTonight, a mobile-phone app that offers discounts of up to 70% of listed prices for same-day hotel bookings. Another startup, TripBAM, monitors prices even after a traveler has made a booking. The website offers users the option of canceling and rebooking whenever TripBAM spots a cheaper price at a competing brand.

Yapta—which stands for your amazing personal travel assistant—similarly tracks both hotel and airline reservations and alerts users when rates or fares drop.

One traveler used TripBAM to get more than $100 a night off a room at the Hilton Doubletree in Chicago, shown. Alisa Steck/Rocketroom

Several of these companies exploit economics particular to the hotel industry. As more rooms fill up and supply shrinks for any given night, the price for the last remaining rooms often gets lower rather than higher. This dynamic reflects, in part, that rooms are perishable items that generate no revenue when they are empty.

Unlike the airline industry, where companies can charge $200 for a domestic flight change, many hotels allow guests to cancel 24 hours ahead of time—or even as late as the same day as the reservation—without penalty.

Stayful's technology aims to determine whether a hotel room's price is higher than the market suggests it should be. The data-crunching process considers variables such as the current supply and historic demand for a property, the season, the day of the week and the prices being offered by the hotel's direct competitors.

A hotel can reject any Stayful bid, and the website's users can aggressively bid a price even lower than what Stayful determines is the room's "fair value." But co-founder Cheryl Rosner says that about 60% of the time, hotels accept the Stayful-recommended bid. Most of the other times, she says, the hotel counters with a rate that is higher than the Stayful bid but still lower than the advertised price.

Stayful Stayful

HotelTonight HotelTonight

TripBam TripBam

Hotelied Hotelied

For some travelers, these new companies won't hold much appeal. Their main attraction is that they ferret out the best price, often at the expense of convenience, flexibility or the ability to collect points for future upgrades and free stays. Some of the big hotel brands, including Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. and Marriott International Inc., tend not to allow guests to accumulate loyalty-program points if they book through third parties offering discounts.

Vincent Costantini, chief executive officer of Roseview, a Boston-based real-estate investment and advisory firm, says he occasionally uses discount travel sites like Hotwire. But he says people at his firm have been burned when their travel plans changed, because bookings at many of these sites are nonrefundable.

"If you have to eat a lot of reservations," Mr. Costantini says. "You're not saving anything at all."

There are also future risks that the discounted supply these sites feed on will shrink. The large hotel companies that control a chunk of inventory could take steps to keep their rooms away from these sites if they feel their pricing power is suffering, hotel analysts say.

But in some cases, certain brands have decided it is better to play along than to forgo business. HotelTonight, for example, had focused mostly on independent or small-company hotels since launching in 2011. In January, the San Francisco-based company announced it reached its first agreements with major brands, including Hyatt Hotels Corp. and InterContinental Hotels Group.

Andrew Joia, a graphic and web designer from Brooklyn, N.Y., heard about TripBAM from a friend and decided to try it for a business trip to Chicago. He booked a room at the Hilton Doubletree for $289 a night while identifying eight downtown properties as part of his group of hotels for TripBAM to monitor. He asked the website to notify him if any of the hotels offered daily rates at least $5 below Doubletree's.

Within 48 hours, he was getting emails alerting him to better prices at competing hotels, seeing rates drop to $250 a night at a Hyatt property. A couple of days later, TripBAM informed him that his original choice was offering $185 a night. So he stayed at the same Doubletree while saving $100.

Another site, Hotelied, went live in April. It wrestles discounts from hotels for users who are particularly active on social media. Chief executive Zeev Sharon says he has identified properties—such as Sixty Beverly Hills and Manhattan's Crosby Street Hotel—that will offer reduced rates of up to 30% for people with especially large Twitter followings, a long list of connections on LinkedIn, or a large population of Facebook friends.

Hotelied validates the guests' social-media connections for the hotels, which are willing to offer these discounts in hopes that the travelers will tell their friends and followers about the experience. Hotelied says that there is no set number of contacts required for discounted rates, as every hotel sets its own threshold, but most active social-media users should be able to access at least a few unpublished discounts on Hotelied.

Stayful's Ms. Rosner, who had worked at the booking site Hotels.com, says that when she vacationed she would email independent hotels and ask if she could have a room for less than the advertised rate.

To her surprise, she found that her offer was often accepted, or at least she received a counteroffer.

"I told my friends about it, but they felt uncomfortable doing the bargaining," she says. "So they asked me to do it." That's when she decided to start the company. Stayful works with 1,000 independently owned or boutique hotels.

Contributed by Craig Karmin at craig.karmin@wsj.com

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