I'm going to tell you about the
Hotel Tonight app and run some tests to find out if using it can actually save you any money.
Hello! Welcome to Trip Hacks DC, my name is Rob.
I'm a tour guide here in the nation's capital. If you're coming to Washington DC
and you're looking for the best tips, tricks, and hacks for exploring the city, make sure to subscribe to this channel and hit the bell
notification icon so that you don't miss any new videos.
And if you're interested in signing up for a Trip Hacks DC tour, head on over to TripHacksDC.com
afterwards, to see the tours that I offer. Whether you're coming to DC or traveling elsewhere
getting a great rate on your hotel room is one of the most important trip hacks. If you haven't seen it yet
I will leave a link in the video description to my previous video where I showed you how to get a great rate when booking
directly with hotels. People occasionally ask me about the Hotel Tonight app which advertises
amazing rates on last-minute bookings. You can use this app in cities all over the world,
but since this channel is about Washington DC
it made the most sense for me to test it out here; and before we get into the specifics if you watch this video and
decide you do want to try out the app you can get $25 off your first booking by using the promo code THACKSDC
That code works in any city
and I will leave it in the video description so you can retrieve it later. In the first part of this video
I'm going to explain what the Hotel Tonight app is and how it works.
So if you only care about my price comparison tests you can go ahead and skip to [4:39].
And if you only want my final opinion about whether this app is worth using or not go ahead and skip to [6:14]
The video. With all of that said let's get started... Hotel tonight isn't
actually new; it's been around
since 2010. When it launched the premise was simple: the business model for a hotel is to sell all of their rooms at the highest
price the customers are willing to pay; but reality is a lot more complicated than that, and a lot of times hotels wind up with
unsold rooms. If a hotel has rooms that it wasn't able to sell by that last day
they would put them on Hotel Tonight and sell them off at a discount. From the hotel's perspective
it's better to sell the room for a little money than to have it go vacant and make no money. This
concept was not new in 2010. Priceline and
Hotwire had been allowing travelers to book hotel rooms for very cheap rates for almost a decade before.
However in the case of those two sites you are going in
completely blind. The exact hotel that you booked wasn't actually revealed until after you paid.
Hotel tonight took the surprise out of the equation by allowing you to book exactly the hotel that you want.
They started by allowing the same day or
"tonight" bookings as their name suggests, then they expanded to 7 days and now they've expanded it to 100 days.
So at the time that I'm making this video you can book a room through the Hotel Tonight app
almost three months in advance of your trip. Now, the downside to this is that Hotel Tonight
suffers from a lot of the same problems that Priceline and Hotwire have always had. For example all bookings are
prepaid and 100%
non-refundable. Hotel Tonight claims that this is necessary in order to offer these great rates. For you what this means is that if you can't
make your trip for whatever reason, you aren't getting your money back. The next big limitation is that Hotel Tonight only
guarantees rooms for two adults. The reason for this is that hotels are basically
unloading all of their leftover rooms after their primary customers have checked in. If the only rooms
they have left are the ones with one bed in them, then that's what you're getting. This could easily be a deal breaker for
families or anyone who needs to guarantee more than one bed. Now, some listings on Hotel Tonight will let you actually choose
how many beds you want in your room, but in my testing in Washington DC
almost all of the ones that I came across use the
"Selected by Hotel" option. The last caveat is that
Hotel Tonight
charges extra fees and they're kind of hidden. The way that you can find out what the fees are going to be is to book
your hotel almost all the way through. On the last screen you can tap the question mark next to "taxes and fees"
Hotel tax in Washington DC is 14.5%
so on a $300 booking like the one in this example,
that would be $43.50, but the reason why it's showing up as
$47.34 is because they're charging tax on top of Hotel Tonight's fees.
Which by my calculation is another $24.50. Now on the other hand
I also looked at rooms on here where there's almost no fee, so it's unclear to me
how Hotel Tonight comes up with these fees and why they're so inconsistent,
but the point
of all of this is just to say that you should always double-check that fee
before booking; because if the fee is really high than what looked like a really great deal might be a less of a great deal.
All right, with all the caveats out of the way
let's get into my testing... I ran this test on Tuesday March 6th, 2018
and I tested four different sets of dates: one night tonight;
two nights during the upcoming weekend; five nights a month out; and five nights about three months out. For each set of dates
I took the first five hotels that came up on the hotel tonight app and
then I compared it against the lowest rate that I could find on that hotel's website as if I were booking
directly, so that includes the non-refundable prepaid rates that the hotel offers as well. And for simplicity
I'm only comparing the advertised rates, not
Including the taxes and fees, so you really need to be careful about that when you're using this app for real. For the first test,
tonight, I found discounts on all five results ranging from a modest 7% to a fairly generous
33%. For the upcoming weekend test the results were quite a bit more mixed. Three of the hotels were discounted through the app,
one was exactly the same price as if you'd booked direct,
and one was actually more if you booked it through the app.
Testing a month out the results get even wilder, with one hotel being slightly more expensive
through the app and another being almost half price
through the app. And the same thing goes for the test for the dates three months out. The discounts ranged from a modest
10% to almost half off.
I was actually really surprised by these results,
so much, so that I wanted to run the tests again a week later and what I found were actually very similar results.
I won't spend time getting into it in this video, but if you want to see them
I will leave a link to a blog post in the description with all of this data.
And finally the moment of truth. Would I recommend this app?...
It depends. The biggest pro to the Hotel Tonight app is obviously the discounts. I was honestly shocked at how big some of these discounts
were, even when looking at dates pretty far into the future; however
I realized afterwards that my test is flawed because it's really not a true apples to apples comparison.
What I mean by that is that when I search for dates in Hotel Tonight it returned about 15 hotels each time,
but there are over a hundred hotels in Washington DC.
So say the last time you came to town you stayed at the Renaissance
and you absolutely loved it. If you open the app put in your dates,
and the Renaissance isn't on the list then you can't book it through the app.
But the two biggest cons in my opinion are that the rates are all non-refundable
and you don't get control over the type of room that you get. So my personal travel preference will continue to be booking refundable rates
directly with hotels. This gives you the maximum
flexibility in
planning your trip because remember if a rate drops after you've booked it or another hotel is running a sale,
you can always cancel your original booking and make a new one. And lastly, when you use any third party booking service
including Hotel Tonight, it can really complicate things if
anything goes wrong. On the other hand I can definitely see some value for some kinds of travelers,
I'm thinking specifically of the solo traveler or the couple
who doesn't need to guarantee that their room has more than one bed, or a last minute traveler who just doesn't care about the flexibility
of having a refundable rates. So if you do want to try it out
and it's your first time you can use the promo code
THACKSDC for $25 off your first booking.
And if you're watching this video because you're traveling to Washington DC and looking for tips and hacks for your trip,
you can subscribe to this channel by clicking on the Trip Hacks DC logo
which is popping up right now at the bottom of the screen, or you can click on the Capitol dome on the left side of
my head, that'll take you over to TripHacksDC.com where you can see the tours that I offer. Enjoy your trip!
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