How to Save Big with Extreme Hotel Deals

Over the past couple of months, I’ve booked two extreme hotel deals. The first was an executive suite at the nearby Grand Hyatt in Denver—a family favorite—for a 1-night “staycation.” That room usually goes for about $380, including tax. I paid $114 after tax, a savings of $266 (70%).

The Grand Hyatt Baha Mar, Bahamas

Saving 70% on a hotel is incredible. But my second booking made the first look like child’s play:

I booked 6 nights in a 2,500 sq. ft., 3-bedroom Ocean View Residence at The Grand Hyatt Baha Mar in the Bahamas. The 6-night, all-in price for this monster should have been a jaw-dropping $25,680. But I paid $2,210, a discount of $23,470 (91%).

The way I scored these deals is new to me. In this post I’ll show you how to do likewise. And I’ll show how you can sometimes do so using points instead of cash (if you prefer).

Extreme Hotel Deals

Background

I learned about both above hotel deals through a site called Extreme Hotel Deals. Extreme Hotel Deals (EHD) finds incredible hotel deals and posts them on their Hot Deal Alerts page.

As EHD shows on their FAQ page, deals can be the result of promo rates hotels run to spark viral marketing, competitor pricing, mistake fares, flash sales, or other such anomalies.

Frequency and Type of Deals

About two-and-a-half months ago, I signed up for free (here) to receive EHD’s Hot Deal Alerts by email. In the ~82 days between then and now, EHD has sent me 34 emails containing 39-45 deals, depending on how you count them. So, EHD has sent me a hotel deal about every other day, on average.

I haven’t researched every deal, and some have been better than others. But they have seemed to qualify as “extreme.” Most have been for domestic stays with a higher proportion in California and New York. But smaller cities (e.g., Greensburg, IN) as well as international destinations (e.g., Bahamas, England, Mexico) are included as well.

How to Get Extreme Hotel Deals: 2 Steps

If you want to book these sorts of deals, there are two things you should do.

1. Get EHD Email Alerts

First, sign up (for free) to receive EHD’s Hot Deal Alerts by email. That way you’ll have the key info for deals at your fingertips.

But—and I can’t emphasize this enough—you will miss some of the best deals if the only way you are notified about them is by email. That’s because some deals sell out very quickly, and no one is glued to email 24/7.

2. Get EHD Text Alerts

The key to landing the very best deals is to receive text alerts when the deals break.

The day The Grand Hyatt Baha Mar, Bahamas deal was published, I was walking through a convention center. I received a text indicating that EHD had published a new deal. I quickly pulled up email on my phone and saw that EHD was calling it the “deal of the year.” I sat down and opened my laptop. Within minutes I tried to book a room, but it disappeared moments before I completed the purchase. But I was able to snag another before the deal died.

There are two ways you can get Extreme Hotel Deals text alerts:

1. Gmail → text. If you have a Gmail address, follow my instructions in the following post to have Gmail alert you by text whenever Gmail receives an email from EHD: 4 Steps to Receive Deal Alerts Before Anyone Else. That’s what I’ve been doing since first subscribing to EHD’s email alerts.
2. Create SMS Alert. While researching for this post, I found tucked away in EHD’s FAQ page a way that EHD provides for receiving real-time push notifications by text. Simply text “follow @ExtremeHotDeal” to 40404. You will then receive, by text, any tweet that EHD puts out. Extreme Hotel Deals usually tweets a deal out 1 minute after emailing it. So, this method will often give you a leg up on the competition. That said, I see some deals that EHD emailed but never tweeted. In other cases, EHD tweeted a deal hours after emailing it out. So, Gmail → text is my #1 recommendation for getting alerts. For now, I’m going to stay signed up for both notification methods. Can’t hurt.

How to Book these Deals with Points

Given that I’d love to take the family to the Bahamas, booking a $25,680 stay for $2,210 is an amazing deal. But there’s still one problem: I do have to cough up $2,110. For a person like me who mostly pays for hotel stays with points, paying anything for a hotel room is, if not painful, at least suboptimal.

For cash deals like these, you aren’t going to be able to pay for them with points from Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Marriott, etc.

But there are still a couple of ways around being out the cash.

1. Book with Transferable Points

While preparing to purchase the first room that I tried to get at The Grand Hyatt Baha Mar, I quickly checked to see if I could book the room with Chase Ultimate Reward points. I couldn’t. (And that delay cost me the room as it was no longer available, a minute later, when I tried to complete my purchase. It was an even more expensive room than the one I ended up booking! But, as I realized later, it only had two bedrooms, so I ended up happier with the 3-bedroom booking I was able to make.)

More recently, however, EHD published a deal for the 4-star “Dream South Beach” hotel in Miami. When the deal broke, you could snag a base level room for $67 (somewhere in the ballpark of a 70% discount).

This time, when I quickly checked the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal, I found that the same room could be booked with points:

When will it Work to Book with Transferable Points?

In the case of the Hyatt Baha Mar, I think the ridiculous sale price I nabbed was for World of Hyatt members or some such restriction. I’m guessing that’s why the room didn’t show up as bookable at the same discount through the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal.

But in the case of the Dream South Beach hotel, I think the rate was just a standard sort of rate, which is why it did show up in the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal.

Checking to see if you can book an EHD deal with transferable points such as AMEX Membership Rewards, Chase Ultimate Rewards, or City ThankYou Points takes an extra minute, so there’s a risk in checking. You have to weigh the risk of losing a room against your desire to pay with points.

If you do book a refundable room with cash to quickly take it down, you might as well then quickly check to see if you can book with transferable points. If you can, then you can cancel your cash reservation right after booking with points to put the room back into inventory for your fellow cheap crafty lucky traveler.

2. Use a Travel-reimbursing Credit Card

Alternatively, in a case like the one I’m in, where you couldn’t (or didn’t) book the room with points, you have one final play to lower your out-of-pocket cost.

You can open a credit card like the Barclay Arrival Plus which comes with a 70,000-point signup bonus. Those points are worth a cent apiece when redeemed for travel charged to the card. So, by paying for the stay with that card, you can knock $700 off the bill.

In my case, that’s probably what I’ll do. My wife may even open her own version of this card as well and split the hotel bill with me so that we can knock $1,400 off the stay. . . . 😉

Checklist for Quick but Smart Booking

When Extreme Hotel Deals publishes a deal, every second counts. So, you want to hurry. But you also don’t want to make a costly mistake.

To that end, I recommend bookmarking this post so that you can quickly return to run through the following checklist, which contains tips from me and from EHD’s FAQ page:

When Booking:

1. Dates. Quickly check your calendar to make sure you don’t have an immovable conflict. No sense tying up a room you can’t use.
2. Refundable? Quickly check to see if the rate is refundable. I passed on one spectacular deal because it was nonrefundable, and I didn’t want to commit. If you do want to commit, however, then it’s better to book a nonrefundable rate as the hotel is more likely to honor it.
3. Credit card. Always book with a credit card (not PayPal, debit card, etc.). Doing so could help a lot if there’s a dispute.
4. Screenshot. Take a screenshot of the screen where you enter your credit card info as well as the confirmation page after completing your purchase. Doing so will help you substantiate the rate you booked.

After Booking:

1. Confirmation email. Verify that the confirmation email you receive shows the price you expect.
2. Wait to book travel. After booking, wait some time to make any nonrefundable travel arrangements. You want to make sure the hotel intends to honor your booking. (If the hotel contacts you not wanting to honor your booking, read what to do here.)
3. CC statement. After a few days, check to see if the charge you expect has posted to your credit card statement.

Hawaii

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HotelDelCoronado1

Conclusion

If you want to stay in a certain city during certain dates, this method of saving big on a hotel stay won’t help. In that case, I’d recommend booking with hotel points or using this trick to “Priceline hack” a luxury hotel for a fraction of its normal price.

But if you’re willing to build a trip around an incredible hotel deal, then you can’t do better than booking one of these extreme hotel deals.

Question: Have you booked one of Extreme Hotel Deals’ offerings? If so, how good a deal was it for you? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

Hat tip: Doctor of Credit