If you are looking for a cheap hotel right now, deals are practically everywhere around you. But if you really want to find the best of the best deals, and you have the luxury of flexibility in scheduling, then timing is a major factor you want to consider. First off, rule out all of the obvious dates such as the summer time, Christmas, Thanksgiving, 4th of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day and the like. Then you also want to think about making your hotel stays ideally on Mondays, Tuesdays & Wednesdays if you can, as rates tend to creep up on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays with the weekend crowd.
Choosing the right day/date and time of year can lead to incredibly increased savings on your hotel bill and sometimes some extra freebies as well such as dinners, breakfasts, in room movies, tours, activities/outings, complimentary or discounted spa treatments, concert tickets and more. A travel agent and even the hotel of your choice can help your navigate these sometimes complex calendars if you ask them nicely. Ask them when the absolute cheapest times of year and days of the week during those times will be in the coming months and you may be surprised how helpful even the hoteliers can be in this current economic climate. For awhile there, many of the hotels were in denial and were slow to react to or admit the existence of the recession, just like many of the politicians and other businesses were – keeping their heads in the sand in denial that anything negative or downward was happening at all. But then reality took a firm hold, hotel stay numbers went dramatically down and the hoteliers had to admit to themselves that it was a new time and new approaches needed to be considered.
Once the hotels finally admitted to themselves there was a recession, this began a new era of not just lower prices, but of honesty, openness and flexibility as the hotels that did this saw better results than the ones that steadfastly clung to the old way of doing things, thinking they could still dictate the terms and prices to customers, rather than vice versa. Nowadays you can call most quality hotels, chain or otherwise and get more honest answers about when the best times to book are or if waiting on booking until the last minute is more in your favor. And if you come up against anything else, move on to a competitor as you don’t want to support the old guard way of screwing over customers rather than serving them.
