When people ask me, ”What`s the best $50 hotel room?” in some U.S. city, my answer is easy: ”It`s a $100 room at half price.”
One of the best discount travel deals for consumers, overall, is 50 percent off the rack, or regular, rate at a hotel. Anyone who travels frequently should buy into one of a dozen or so programs that provide these good deals.
With some, you ”join” a club or association and pay dues up to $100 a year; with others, you buy a $25 to $40 directory good for a year or more. Either way, the program workings are about the same. When you join a program or buy a book, you get a membership card and a directory that lists participating hotels by state and city. You look up the listings for your destination, select a hotel, call (or fax) the hotel directly and ask if it has a room available at your program`s half-price rate for the night(s) you want to stay.
If it does, you make your reservation, show your identification when you check in and pay when you check out, by cash or credit card. If the first hotel you try doesn`t have a room available, try others.
What determines if a room is available at half price? That`s up to each hotel. But typically, you`ll get a discount if the hotel projects that no more than 80 percent of its rooms will be filled on the night you want to stay.
Some hotels rely entirely on the 80 percent rule to keep discounts under control. Others, however, apply additional blackouts to some peak periods. Half-price discounts may be limited to weekends at some city locations, for example, or to weekdays at some resort areas. And you won`t get a discount in New Orleans during Mardi Gras or in Chicago when there`s a big convention.
Why do hotels cut prices by as much as 50 percent? They`re doing what the airlines do when they offer some seats for half, or even less than half, the top price. It`s called ”yield management,” and it`s based on the economic principle that a hotel will take in more total revenue by selling some rooms at a high price and some at a cut price than they would by selling all the rooms at the same intermediate price.
Probably the biggest half-price program is run by Entertainment Publications. Entertainment works by selling directories-more than 100, covering the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and Europe. In all, Entertainment has signed up more than 5,000 hotels, but no more than 1,700 are listed in any individual directory. If you`re looking for a good selection of hotels in North America, ”Travel America at HalfPrice” ($32.95) is the best of Entertainment`s options. Consider also the books for individual major cities ($25 to $40 each), which contain discount offers for restaurants and tourist attractions, as well as hotels. You can buy books through
Entertainment offices in many major cities, or call 800-477-3234 to order.
International Travel Card is another large half-price hotel program; it`s widely available as an added benefit of full-service travel clubs run by department stores and oil companies (or separately at $36 a year;
800-342-0558). Similarly, Quest International is available separately ($99;
509-248-7512) or as a benefit of some travel clubs.
In addition to a list of nearly 1,000 half-price hotels, Privilege Card offers discounts of less than 50 percent at some attractive hotels that aren`t willing to give as much as half off, including many Embassy Suites and some of San Francisco`s popular small hotels. Membership costs $49.95 a year; call 800-359-0066.
Don`t buy into a half-price program if you demand that it work every time. It won`t work every time-no hotel will cut 50 percent off the price of a room it could fill at 100 percent of the price. On average, however, the programs work well enough to justify their cost, and then some.
