Booking cheap travel has never been easier. The number of tools available to the web-savvy traveler has exploded in just the last five years. While it can all seem a bit overwhelming, here are three tips to help you score a dirt-cheap hotel room almost anywhere!
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Find a Site with Good “Perks”
In addition to the other tactics listed here, be sure to find a website with additional perks. There are countless travel booking engines all competing for your business. Many use the same booking engine software behind the scenes and don’t actually differ that much from one another. Sites like traveloka, however, charge no booking fees and allow users to pay with various payment methods. We ran a quick search on Langkawi hotels, for example, and found incredibly low rates.
Stay During the Week
Of course, the cheapest time to stay at a hotel is when other people aren’t staying. This usually means mid-week as vacationers and day-trippers typically travel over the weekend. Stay Sunday night through Friday morning and you’re likely to land the cheapest rates. In some cases, you might save as much as 50% off or more. The only case where this may not be true is in popular convention cities (think: Orlando and Chicago) where hotels may raise their rates midweek to account for the heavy flow of business travelers.
Be a Loyal Guest
It’s not just airlines that treat frequent flyers well. Hotels these days are hyper-competitive when it comes to loyalty programs. Starwood, for example, often provides complimentary upgrades (free Wi-Fi, room category upgrades, etc.) to loyalty program subscribers. If you travel even a few times a year, I recommend joining every program you can get your hands on. Every single one is free, so there’s no reason not to join. Every stay counts toward your rewards and many programs even allow you to use airline miles for hotel rewards and vice versa!