Best accomodation booking tips

Our well-travelled staff weigh in with their own advice on searching for and booking the best value accommodation - share your best tips in the comments below.

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One of the tips in the article is to sign up for discounts.

A Warning:
we did this years ago with one of the major hotel chains supposedly to get cheaper rooms and priority service. Bad, BAD move! The next times we wanted to book, the on-line rates were cheaper than they were offering us as ‘special’ members, AND, we when we got to the hotel, the wouldn’t give us the room we booked, as members were excluded from booking certain classes of rooms (eg the rooms with the best views) because of the (more expensive) deal we were getting as ‘special members’. The ‘special deals’ are were special, but the hotel were beneficiaries, not us. AND, they wouldn’t cancel our reservation as per their membership T&Cs.

Cancelled the membership then and there at the reception desk!

Later we wrote to the hotel about this. In response we got was full of trite answers completely side stepping the issues and absolving themselves of any responsibility

Then to make matters worse, for years we kept getting calls offering us various ‘special deals’ and wanting to tell us about the benefits of membership. Each time we asked them to take us off their call list because we weren’t ever going to take them up on anything. Finally after several years I had to threaten them that we were on the Do Not Call register and the business would get into trouble before the calls stopped.

Amazingly, somehow our phone number got to other hotels who had offers too. (Could have been the same call centre perhaps??) Took years before the regular calls stopped.

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