When you’re on the road, sometimes you inevitably need to use an OTA (Online Travel Agency, commonly known as a third-party booking site) to book lodging. For example, even though I have top-tier elite status with multiple hotel groups, when traveling with family and friends: I may not want the other rooms to miss out on benefits, I still want everyone to stay somewhere comfortable, I don’t like Airbnb, and I want to save some money. In many cases, I’ll choose to book a hotel with breakfast included through an OTA. Because of the BRG policies at major hotel chains, most of the time I pick hotels from the major North American groups that already include breakfast for two by default. These properties are usually priced close to the official website, such as IHG’s Holiday Inn Express; Hilton’s Hampton Inn By Hilton; Marriott’s SpringHill, Fairfiled, Residence Inn, and TownePlace; and Hyatt’s Hyatt House. Then I use a few other discount methods, introduced below, to effectively lower the room cost.

About Hotels.com

Hotels.com, known in Chinese as “好订网,” was founded in 1991. It was originally called the Hotel Reservations Network (HRN), became part of OTA giant Expedia, Inc in 2001, and was renamed Hotels.com in 2002. It is currently headquartered in Dallas. In 2016, Hotels.com took over another Expedia OTA, Venere.com. Its main business today is hotel bookings, though it also offers Vacation Packages. This article mainly covers its hotel business.

Sign-up Bonus

New user sign-up Coupon (temporarily unavailable): New users who sign up through our link (just enter your email address) will receive an email from Hotels.com within a day. There will likely be plenty of other promotional emails too, so watch for the right one. It will include a $200-$50 Coupon. There are some limitations, but it costs nothing to register.

  • Email subject: “Want $50 off at Hotels. com?”, sender: “hotels@talkable. com”. It can easily be flagged as Spam by your email system, and it looks like the image below;
  • The Coupon is limited to your first booking. If you book multiple rooms or stay multiple nights, it is still pretty easy to reach $200.
  • Booking requirement: use by December 31, 2019
  • Stay requirement: complete the stay by March 31, 2020

How to Book

Standard booking

The site supports booking multiple rooms in a single reservation. Each room can have a different guest name, and you can also book separately for someone else;

The booking interface is also user-friendly, clearly showing whether the stay is eligible to earn/redeem Rewards (covered below), whether it is refundable in advance, whether breakfast is included, and so on;

At the bottom of the booking page there is an at a glance section, introducing the hotel’s basic information, transportation options and parking fees, as well as which credit card types are accepted for pay-at-property bookings;

Secret Price

Members get access to Secret Price rates, which are a bit lower than the regular price. They can be quite useful when you have a must-stay situation. The link is here: https://www.hotels.com/hotel-deals/secret-prices-us/?intlid=Account_Rewards_Activity_Page

Payment Methods

The following payment methods are supported:

  • Credit card / debit card: supports nearly all major bank card types from China and the US
  • PayPal: supports PayPal accounts from all countries; intro to PayPal (click to view)
  • Hotels.com Gift Card
  • Rewards and Coupons
  • You can combine payment methods, such as “gift card + credit card” or “gift card + Rewards + credit card”;

Rewards Program

Stay 10 nights, get 1 free

Stay 10 nights and get 1 free night. This is essentially the core of Hotels.com Rewards. Starting from your first stay, as long as you complete 10 paid stays within one year (gift card payments count, reward stays do not), you’ll earn one reward stay. After earning one Free Night, you can immediately begin working toward a second Free Night.

  • The value of each Free Night is the average pre-tax price of your first 10 stays.
  • A Free Night is valid for one year from the date it is earned.
  • If you redeem a Free Night for a stay, that redeemed night will not earn Rewards. For example, if you stay 3 nights and redeem 1 of them with a Free Night, then regardless of the room rate, only 2 nights will count toward your next round of Rewards.
  • You can only use one FN for one night. If the FN value >= that night’s room rate, you only need to pay taxes and fees, and the difference will not be refunded. If the FN value < the nightly room rate, you need to pay the difference plus taxes and fees. The remaining amount can be paid with a gift card, credit card, or PayPal.
  • Each booking can use only one FN or Coupon. For multi-night redemptions, you can book one night at a time.
  • Redemption path: at checkout, on the lower right side of the page, click Redeem 1 free* night with this booking. Currently, there is no redemption fee when using the mobile app for FN bookings, while website redemptions require a $5 fee.

Elite tiers and benefits

There are three membership levels: basic member (Rewards), Silver, and Gold. Silver and Gold come with a few modest benefits. At hotels participating in hotels.com VIP Access, benefits may include a welcome gift, airport transfers, breakfast, spa perks, upgrades, and more. However, the share of participating properties is not very high.

  • From your first stay date, stay 10 nights within one year to be upgraded to Silver; the same requirement applies for renewal. Silver benefits are listed on the official website: https://www.hotels.com/rewards/silver.html
  • From your first stay date, stay 30 nights within one year to be upgraded to Gold; the same requirement applies for renewal. Gold benefits are listed on the official website: https://www.hotels.com/rewards/gold.html

Price Guarantee

To request a price match, the submit request link is here: https://www.hotels.com/customer_care/pillar/price_guarantee.html. After Hotels.com verifies it, it will handle it as follows:

Price Guarantee for Hotels.com Bookings

  • For refundable bookings, you can either call Hotels.com directly for a refund or log in to your account and make the change yourself. If there is no longer any availability for the room, it is recommended to call and request a refund for the price difference.
  • For non-refundable bookings, the official site does not clearly explain the process. Our guess is that you may be able to call and receive a Coupon for the price difference (sent by email for future bookings).

Price Guarantee for Other OTAs or Direct Hotel Bookings

  • For refundable bookings: if you paid online, the official platform will refund the price difference back to your bank card; if you chose pay-at-hotel, the price difference will be refunded to your bank card after you complete your stay.
  • For non-refundable bookings, you will receive a Coupon for the price difference (sent by email) for future bookings.

How to Save on Hotel Stays

Rewards

The Rewards program itself is already a great deal: stay 10 nights and get 1 free night. If you mostly travel alone, it may take a while to accumulate nights. But if you are traveling with multiple people, you can book multiple rooms, and the “total room nights × number of rooms” will count toward Rewards. You can also remotely book rooms for relatives or friends. Just enter the actual guest’s information for check-in, which also makes it easier for them to check in.

Coupons

  • New user sign-up Coupon: new users can register through our link (just enter your email address). After you receive the email from Hotels.com (sent within 1 day), it will include a first-order $200-$50 Coupon. See Part 2 of this article for details.
  • The official site occasionally sends out some good Coupons. If there is a worthwhile offer, we will share it with everyone as soon as possible.

Gift Cards and Purchase Discounts

Hotels.com also issues its own gift cards. In the past, the official site even allowed you to check balance and combine balance online, which was very convenient. Although the link still opens, the official site no longer allows this. You now need to call customer service to check balances and combine gift cards: +1-888-999-4468.

Online Purchase Discounts

Note: Newly registered Drop accounts probably no longer have the Amazon benefit. Older Drop accounts all have Amazon 20 points/USD cash back. If your friend has multiple older Drop accounts, you can just ask them to transfer one to you (simply change the email address and phone number to yours).

In-Store Purchase Discounts

  • Use supermarket category cards, such as the AMEX Gold credit card earning 4 x MR at supermarkets, to buy gift cards there
  • Use gas station category cards, such as the soon-to-be-refreshed AMEX Green credit card earning 4 x MR, to buy gift cards at certain gas stations

Using Mainland China Credit Cards for Overseas Cash Back

Credit cards with strong overseas online and offline cash back can be used for buying eGCs online in the US (US official site, Amazon, etc.), booking through Hotels.com online, or paying hotels in person. If you are staying at hotels in Mainland China, you can do so by buying gift cards or paying online through the US hotels.com site.

Promotions from Mainland China card networks also often include deals for Hotels.com. See the links in this article for more details. Recently there have been the following two promotions:

Credit Card offer

  • The Capital One Venture credit card earns 10X miles on Hotels.com purchases, worth roughly 10～14%. The promotion lasts through January 2020. See here
  • Hotel/travel category cards with strong return rates, such as CSR 3x UR/CSP 2x UR, etc.
  • Use Mainland China credit cards with high offline cash back when staying at hotels outside Mainland China (for Mainland China hotels, gift cards can be used as a workaround).
  • Standard Chartered Mainland China credit cards: two cards had a Hotels.com 10%-12% off promotion, with booking through the end of 2019 and stays through the end of March 2020. Details here: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fpZpuA1MASs4NB2Mtni-2w

Cash Back Portals

  • Most cash back sites offer rebates for Hotels.com. For example, Ebate or TopCashback often has 10% cash back. Usually this only works on cash bookings rather than gift card bookings, though in practice enforcement is sometimes not very strict. YMMV
  • If you are booking hotels outside the US, some cash back portals may not work.

Elite Benefits During Your Stay

Most hotels will not provide elite benefits on OTA bookings, though Marriott did in earlier years. It seems some Marriott properties in Asia-Pacific still may, YMMV

Drawbacks of Hotels.com

  • Like all OTAs, you generally cannot earn hotel loyalty program stay/night/points（SNP） or receive elite benefits (with a few exceptions);
  • Compared with other OTAs, hotel coverage is still somewhat smaller. However, the major hotel groups most of us stay with are all included;
  • The price is not always the lowest among OTAs, but when you factor in US gift card discounts plus the Hotels.com Rewards program, it can be very cheap if used well;

Conclusion

Hotels.com is an OTA I use often. Besides using it for group trips, I sometimes also mix it with direct hotel bookings on the hotel’s official website. If you still want to enjoy elite benefits from the hotel’s own loyalty program, such as upgrades and late checkout, this kind of mixed strategy can be worth trying occasionally. For example, if you are staying 3 nights, you could make a “Day-1 hotel website + Day-2 OTA + Day-3 hotel website” sandwich-style booking. That way, you can preserve the benefits on the first and last nights, and sometimes the hotel may extend those benefits to the middle night as well. At the very least, if you were upgraded on the first day, they probably will not make you move out of the room. Of course, the hotel may not give you breakfast or lounge access on the OTA-booked night, so YMMV.