Too many hours of my life have been spent trying to find the free angle of a hotel in a city that doesn’t have points hotels. This post is the result of me wanting to go these specific places that don’t have points hotels, and I sometimes have specific hotels picked out!
Getting free nights with the major chains has been super easy via credit card bonuses, spending bonuses, or even best rate guarantees. But outside of the major chains, sometimes I’ve been able to succeed in getting free hotels, and sometimes I haven’t. But my skills have no doubt been expanded.
This post is an overview of the methods to get free nights at non-chain hotels.
Also, two other posts were kind of born out of the same search and same desire. Best Hotel Booking Site (or OTA) Rewards Program, and The BRG Experiments 2.0. This post sums up some of those points, overviews them, and discusses some new ones. This is 2.0 version of those… maybe?
I’ll briefly talk about the concepts of discounting hotels (good foundational skills) and then move into attempts at free hotels.
First, Making Hotels Cheaper
There are a number of ways to get hotels cheaper, or at the very least there are ways to get more back in terms of rewards.
For example you can combine a few things:
Cashback sites
OTA discounts
Good credit card perks
Cashback sites
Pretty simple. You click one of these links to get taken to the website and you get a certain percentage back. This can generally range from 1% to 10%, varying greatly by hotel booking site. Also, if you want to signup for a few, here are my referral links:
mrrebates
topcashback
bigcrumbs
ebates
OTA Discounts
Check this flyertalk thread for discounts on booking hotels with many major booking sites. It is common to find a booking site offering 25% off. It’s rare, but on occasion there have been even better deals.
This is by far where I see the biggest discount coming through. And outside of BRGs, I don’t actually see the OTA rewards programs becoming too useful.
Best Credit Cards
Not a huge deal, but the Citi Prestige and Premier earn 3 points per dollar at hotels. And the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Ink Plus earn 2 points per dollar at hotels. Not going to move the needle.
Citi Prestige 4th Night Free
Frequent Miler has been the best resource around for leaning about the Citi Prestige’s 4th night free benefit. But in short, it’s the ability to book 4 nights and pay for 3 via Citi. You have to call them up and they just pay you back for the amount of the 4th night. The cool part is that if the 4th night is way more expensive, if you paid for nights 1-3, they still credit you back for the 4th night. This could be a huge way to save on a really expensive night!
If you’re interested in more, check out FM’s post on this card’s benefit here.
Ways to make non-points hotels free
Cheap is sometimes the best I can do. Although 99% of the time there is a way to make a hotel anywhere free. However, I max out in how much time I should spend on the subject or trying to find the angle. Spending 40 hours trying to get a free hotel that’s otherwise $150… just doesn’t seem smart.
Yet, the concept of the BRG Experiments 2.0 is that I am spending a ton of hours trying to find a methodology that works with non-chain hotels.
OTA BRGs 2.0
This is the best way I currently see of accomplishing the goal of specific hotels being free, in non-chain hotels at least. Check out my Complete Guide on Best Rate Guarantees.
The idea is that if you book on one site and then find a lower rate on a competing site, the site you booked on will match the lower rate and compensate you. Compensation can be as much as $200 credit, $100 hotel gift cards, or $50 cash.
But understand that this takes some initial investment as you have to pay for the first hotel. Say you BRGed a $50 hotel and then got a $50 Expedia coupon because of it. That’s not 100% off, that’s 100% back, which is very different. It’s more like 50% off. However, it starts to drop below 50% and continues to drop if you can get more coupons in the process of using the coupons.
Despite this being a great method, I have not finished conducting my experiments and have a couple more months of testing, I’d guess. For more about reusing check out the BRG experiments 2.0 or subscribe to my monthly “off-line content” only newsletter to stay tuned about the progress when I finish. Or check out the knowledge currently available with the BRG Complete Guide.
Using Miles for Hotel Bookings
There are some really poor uses of miles and points that I’m hesitant to mention but will because I want to give the full number of options.
Most airlines allow this thing where you search for and book hotels with miles, right on that airline’s website. It’s nothing complicated, they just make a deal with a booking engine for them to pay a discount cash rate to book your hotel, and then they just deduct an absurd amount of miles.
I went through a ton of airline frequent flyer sites and tried to see which ones offered the best rates for hotel bookings. The goal was to see if there were any tricks where I could transfer something like Amex points to an airline instead of a hotel and book for less points than if I had transferred to a hotel. I found basically no great deals and that’s why I never did a post on it.
But I’ll go over why the math is bad in a second.
Real quick I’ll mention some of the values I had gotten when using miles to book hotels. Here are some rough values of miles when using miles for hotels:
British Airways = .6 – 1.05 cents per mile
Asia Miles = .56 – .78 cents per mile
United miles = .6 cents per mile
AirCanada miles = .58 cents per mile
AA miles = .41 cents per mile
Qantas = .41 cents per mile
Lufthansa = .25 cents per mile
In other words, this means that if I get .41 cents per mile with AA miles (in general), I could therefore book a hotel that’s going for $200 for 48,000+ AA miles. Which doesn’t sound that bad until you realize that you could get a roundtrip to Europe for that many AA miles. Flights that might cost $1,000+ are being forfeited for a $200 hotel
But imagine that I transferred 50,000 points out of Citi to some airline that gave me that sort of value, and then I was crazy enough to book a $200 hotel using 50,000 miles. Then realize that Citi actually gives 1.25 cents per point towards hotels. So that $200 hotel would have only cost you 16,000 Citi points! In other words, you would be wasting 34,000 miles to book with miles.
Obviously the lesson here is that you shouldn’t use miles for hotel bookings.
IHG Anywhere
I wrote about using IHG to book competitor hotels last year, and this is basically the exact same thing as the airline rewards programs offering the ability to book random hotels. IHG too has a search box buried on a typically dysfunctional page that allows you to book non IHG hotels. Check it out here.
Unfortunately, the value is also pretty low. It’s .25 to .3 cents per point to book a hotel. In other words a $100 hotel could cost you 35,000 points.
Good use? No. But could it save you money? Maybe.
My view is this. If you have a million billion IHG points from work travel and you want to use those hotel points to go to Zakynthos, or somewhere you probably don’t have any other points options, go ahead. BUT, if you bought those points earlier from a sale (or the cash + points trick) for .7 cents each and now you’re redeeming them for this hotel for .3 cents each… you’re an idiot. In other words, you indirectly paid more than twice the cash rate for the hotel.
So if your IHG points are actually free (from work travels), you might as well use IHG Anywhere. But if those points cost you one way or another, it’s probably a rip off.
AirBNB Referral Credits
I love the concept of airbnb despite sometimes being skeptical of whether or not it fits my needs. The truth is that the range of experience from airbnb is huge, and you can have whatever experience you want. Want just a room in some family’s house? They have it. Want an entire house to yourself? They also have it. Decide what you want and sort by it.
Also, sticking with yesterday’s theme of planning a trip to Bulgaria, most of the areas I want to go in this case don’t have points hotels, or chain hotels at all.
Here’s a screenshot of Bulgaria using AwardMapper.com (unchecking Wyndham and Best Western) showing the lack of points hotels in the big country of Bulgaria.
I really have two cities I could stay in, and missing all the sites I said I was most interested in. Plovdiv, Veliko Tarnovo, and the mountains.
In contrast, here is a screenshot from the tiny Mountain town of Bansko which you can see on the above map south of Sofia.
Seriously tons of options. And that is searching for “Entire Place”, because I’m not into sharing, and I made the price range $0 to $100. And there were more options but the map only loads so many at a time. But you get the point. There are more airbnb options in the town of Bankso (population less than 9,000), than there are chain hotels in the entire country of Bulgaria, including Best Western and Wyndham, and by a landslide.
So that’s the why of airbnb; because it’s everywhere! The how is simply a referral bonus.
To start, you can use my referral link and get $25 off an airbnb stay. This stay has to be at least $75, and I think that’s pretax. Meaning you can get it for $50.
Although, Airbnb is terribly and unfortunately gamable. I’m not going to teach it, but you can definitely earn large amounts of credit while making a profit, if you were so inclined. I haven’t gone that far. But you can take it as little or as far as you want. The most obvious thing to do is to refer your travel companion or your spouse… or have them refer you. They’ll get $25 and you’ll get $25 off. So your $75 stay will cost you $50 and they’ll get $25 in credit. But also know that if you refer someone who actually hosts another person (I believe $75 has to be spent), you get $75 in airbnb credit. You can earn a total of $100 per person. I recommend staying in the lines of the low-hanging fruit of referring someone and getting the discount code.
Trampolinn
I was super grateful when Dia (TheDealMommy) informed me about a method of free travel I had never heard of! Trampolinn. From what I can tell, it’s barely more than a spin off of airbnb. But the good news is that it has a rewards program. You get points for filling out profiles, but the most amount of points comes from two things. 1) 1,000 points for listing your property. And 2) points for just referring a friend. They do have to sign up, but it’s a pretty easy process I imagine.
If you want to learn more, read the original post that gives the details for how to earn points with Trampolinn, by TheDealMommy.
Also, if you want to sign up, use my link:
My Trampolinn referral link
(Although I should note that I used Dia’s link, and you could too because her info on the subject is more solid).
The benefits here are pretty obvious. Get points from completing these dumb tasks, and then use the points to stay at homes and hotels, just like you would with airbnb. Potentially zero upfront costs.
Credit Card points
Perhaps the most obvious way to most people in the hobby would have been credit cards, so I saved it for last. You can use most any bank points to book a hotel via the bank’s travel booking engine.
For me this is mostly a no-g0 with Chase and Amex, who have points I value a lot for the miles they transfer to. For example, I use lots of Untied miles, and Chase points are the best ways to get lots and lots of United miles. It’s too valuable to use on hotels.
But a lot of points like Barclay (the Barclay Arrival + card), Discover, and WellsFargo don’t actually transfer to miles. In fact, the best use for a lot of these points are to redeem them for travel. The Barclay Arrival + card gives you twice the cash back value when you reimburse travel expenses like hotels.
Actually Barclay is the easiest too. Unlike Citi which requires you to book through their portal, Barlcay Arrival + allows you to pay for your hotel and then it just reimburses you based on the points you have. A $100 hotel would require 10,000 points.
But the best part is that you could use all the tricks we talked about here and still pay with the Barclay and get it reimbursed. You could:
Go through a cashback portal
Get rewards points from the booking site
Get /use discounts using promotions codes
… all that, and you can still cover it with the card’s points.
Conclusion
It’s been 4 years of blogging with the goal of finding different ways of free travel and I’m always discovering new things. Of course, things go away and new things start up… but that’s part of the fun of it all.
The main ways here are learning more about the booking sites, learning about alternative booking sites (like Trampolinn/Airbnb), and the traditional route of using credit cards. Hopefully I’ll improve my skill more and more, as it’s only been this year that I started looking at OTAs as options, but was forced to it since they basically book all hotels. Sometimes non-chain hotels don’t even have functional website booking, yet they are on Expedia and other OTAs.
Anyways, hope this less traditional stray from the miles/points path was still enjoyed!