Thursday, January 21, 2010

Luxury Hotel Deals! How to Find Them

With thousands of hotels, all offering promotions, finding a real luxury hotel with a genuine offer is a challenging feat.

Then, getting the best deal at one of these places compounds the degree of difficulty.

One has to be part accountant, attorney and travel agent to be sure the best value is obtained. Let me explain:

First you need to be a travel agent or rely on a trusted one to pick the right hotel. Then you literally have to do the math while comparing nightly rates on an apples-to-apples basis in terns of room categories once you hone in on the place you'd like to stay. Then you have to have a legal mind to sort through the conditions of the deal.

In our experience, hotels concoct special packages with all sorts of value added inclusions. Oftentimes we find that the actual room rate has not been discounted at all and just the inclusions are slightly lower than if one were to purchase them a-la-carte. This is my opinion, is not a real deal!

The real deals are those that include a FREE Night. Free Night offers essentially amount to a significant discount of the nightly rate to the consumer (since the average nightly rate drops over the stay when the free night is factored in) w/o jeopardizing the integrity of published room rates, which the hotel "revenue managers" jealously protect.

To help one find these Free night offers, we have a tab on our luxury hotel site that lists luxury hotels from various brands, sorted by geographic location that have such offers in effect.
Here is the link: http://www.whatahotel.com/browse_specials.cfm

What is unique is that we've gone through the exercise of collecting the information from various sources and have consolidated as many as we could find on one site page.

To see the difference, note how we list numerous Four Season Hotel locations offering "Free Nights" on a single page. Even if you were to go to Four Seasons official website, you would have to click into ALL it's locations to see which one might be offering a Free Night. A real time saver !

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