London Hotels Insight provides up-to-date, independent advice for your perfect stay in London. We research guest feedback, meet management and identify hotels at the top of their game.
Top tips to get a good hotel deal.
We list some savvy ways to get the best deal on your next London hotel
Hotel room rates have always been something of a movable feast. “Rack rate” has never been exactly what everybody paid and most hotels have a yield management program that prices to get the best profit from the hotel – balancing occupancy rates and price to make the optimum return.
That makes it hard to know what the ‘normal’ price is and tricky to find the right deal. However, there’s a few things you can do to beat the system:
- Book well ahead of time. The hotel’s yield management system will aim to sell a certain percentage of rooms several months in advance, locking in revenue, and it will reduce the prices to make that attractive to customers. Wait a week before you need the room and you’ll usually end up paying more. It’s a cliche but booking early really pays.
- Play around with dates. If you’re flexible on dates, particularly if you’re booking via a website and it has a ‘three days before or after’ option (or something similar), you’ll sometimes find you can get a room quite a bit cheaper the day before or two days after you originally wanted to travel. Prices can vary 25 to 30 percent depending on how full the hotel looks like being, so you might strike it lucky. Sunday nights are often the cheapest night at London hotels – especially the luxury ones.
- Keep an eye out for promos and special deals. For instance Hostelbookers.com celebrated its fifth birthday by offering rooms across Europe for 5p a night. Travelodge runs regular budget hotel sales with heavily-discounted rates. Newspapers also offer special deals. Whenever a promotion comes along, think whether you can use it and act quickly. Those ultra-cheap rooms sell out fast as anyone who’s tried the Hoxton’s £1 room sale knows all too well.
Get the best-value London hotel deal from 30+ booking sites in 1 click
Travelodge offers some amazing deals if you sign up to receive email notification of the company's regular flash room sales
- Don’t bother turning up to major hotels on the day. Front desk staff don’t usually have the authority to offer you a great deal – in fact they’re trained to charge “walk-ins” the maximum they can get away with. Check instead for late deals on the internet.
- Consider using ‘top secret deals‘ (from Lastminute.com and other websites). It won’t tell you the name of the hotel but use a bit of savvy and a good search engine and you can usually make an educated guess. The deals can be as much as 50 percent off the price of a room, though you are taking a bit of a risk.
- Don’t just use one website. If you really want (or need) to get a good deal, check several sites to get the best prices. Our metasearch tool at London Hotels Insight does exactly that since it searches 30 websites in one go. Click the following link to give it a whirl:
Get the best-value London hotel deal from 30+ booking sites in 1 click
Do an online search using a 1-click metasearch to find the best deal across multiple sites
- Check the extras – what is and isn’t included. Breakfast at nearly £20 plus extra wifi charges might nix the savings you think you’ve made (though not if you’re happy to grab a coffee and croissant at Pret’s, and put the notebook away for the day).
- Contact the hotel directly for a better deal – the answer will often be no but it’s worth a go. Throw in details like the number of visits you make to the city and your expected spend on extras (particularly if you’re going as a family or group). And don’t be shy to tell them the best price you found online and ask them to match it and throw in some extras – you may be saving them up to 20% commission they might pay to an agent so they have some margin to play around with.
Do also make sure you read our tips to secure a London hotel for the Olympics and our review of Tune Hotel Westminster – currently perhaps the cheapest chain hotel you’ll find in London. Last but not least, if you enjoy finding great ways to save your pennies then we recommend the excellent tips on saving money provided by our friend Karen Bryan.
Get the best-value London hotel deal from 30+ booking sites in 1 click
Photo credits: Travelodge.
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