With the cost of hotel stays generally trending upward — 2024 saw the highest recorded average daily rates in the U.S., for starters — the luxury hospitality world may not seem the most fertile bargain-hunting ground. But you can still find deals, and they go well beyond those you can obtain by converting your credit card and loyalty points into discounts. Here are six ways to get the best prices at some top hotels.
Look for “debut” discounts
When a hotel first opens or signs up with a new booking site, room rates are sometimes heavily discounted. A good starting point is the boutique and luxury hotel membership program Dis-loyalty, run by the Ennismore Lifestyle Collective. For a membership fee of $18 per month, you’ll get deals and perks at 10 hotel brands (Mondrian, SLS and the Hoxton, among others) that include 50 percent off any of the site’s new hotels within the first three months of opening day. One current example: At the Hoxton, Florence, in Italy, which opened in March, members can book a late May stay for a starting nightly rate of $235, compared with the standard $470. Another membership-based hotel collection, Design Hotels, offers free membership and various discounts — among them, 50 percent “debut” savings on certain properties that are new to the collection, including Xela Tulum, a 12-room hotel on Mexico’s Caribbean coast that opened in late 2023. At press time, a sample starting rate in May on the Design Hotels site was $266 per night — half the standard $532.
Try front desk diplomacy
Roberto Cowan, a co-founder of the Desert Vintage boutiques, which has outposts in Tucson, Ariz.; New York; and, later this year, Paris, suggests calling the hotel directly for the best rates. You never know where a politely asked “Is that the best you can do?” will lead, he says. Among his biggest successes was a New Year’s trip to Harmony Nosara, an upscale surfing and yoga retreat in Costa Rica. After the website showed there wasn’t any availability on the days he was hoping to visit, he phoned the front desk and was told that the hotel could accommodate him if he were willing to change rooms during his stay. “I was in the most beautiful place, I didn’t mind having to move [rooms], and they were willing to work with me because of the inconvenience,” he says. In the end, he saved about 40 percent on rooms that typically run about $1,000 per night at that time of year. Wendy Perrin, the founder of a travel advice website, thinks front desk diplomacy may also work to your advantage in other scenarios: say, when you’re already at a hotel and trying to extend your stay, or you’re showing up last-minute, late at night, without a reservation. “The closer you get to the time when the value of the room is going to perish,” she notes, the likelier you are to get a discount.
Sign up for newsletters
Many hospitality brands, marketing consortiums and booking sites have newsletters you can sign up for with a complimentary membership. Though these dispatches are meant primarily as travel inspiration, they also tend to direct subscribers to a wide range of discounts. Small Luxury Hotels, for example, recently offered up to 20 percent off suites at about 168 properties, such as Torralbenc, a farm turned luxury retreat on the Spanish island of Minorca, and the Gaia Riverlodge, a cluster of thatch-roofed cabanas in Belize. And Mr. & Mrs. Smith promoted up to 35 percent off last-minute hotel stays over Easter weekend in destinations including Denver and Buenos Aires. Membership can confer other money-saving perks, too, says Perrin: upgrades, late checkouts, free meals and even the occasional free night.
Call your agent
Travel advisers and consultants who have longstanding relationships with hotel brands — relationships that generate a high volume of sales — can often pass along “agent-exclusive specials” to clients. Even luxury properties that don’t want to be seen as discounting publicly will sometimes give negotiated rates to preferred travel agents, notes Perrin, who recommends destination-specific travel advisers on her website.
Be flexible with your dates
Shifting your check-in and checkout dates by even a day might yield appreciably lower room rates. “Maybe there’s a group in the hotel that’s taking 40 or 50 percent of the rooms, and the event ends on Wednesday night,” says the hospitality industry consultant Bjorn Hanson. “Everyone’s checking out Thursday morning and the hotel’s going to have really low occupancy.” The same sort of thing can happen when a block of rooms is about to come online after renovations: From one day to the next, the hotel might go from low inventory to high. Take New York’s Walker Hotel Tribeca, a ribbon and button factory converted into a boutique hotel with a rooftop bar. At press time, starting nightly rates during the week of May 12 ranged from $411 to $585. The rates for the 18th were as low as $237.
Protect against price drops
The booking site HotelSlash charges $50 annually to send subscribers properties with discounted rates at their intended destinations. A recent search for a long spring weekend in Paris turned up a fully refundable room at Les Bains Paris — the famous nightclub turned cultish hotel in the Marais — for $1,590 for three nights, while the hotel’s own site showed a total of $1,720 for the same stay. If you book, HotelSlash will watch for further price reductions so you can cancel and rebook at the same hotel, as long as you chose a refundable option. Even if you book a refundable room on a different site or through a hotel reservation line, you can forward the confirmation email to HotelSlash for rate monitoring. Magellan Luxury Hotels, another membership-based reservation service that offers competitive rates at upscale brands (including Aman and Rosewood Hotels & Resorts), has a RateCheck program that will automatically rebook you if a lower rate becomes available. And Tablet Hotels plans to introduce a similar program in May, when customers will start hearing about any price drops on bookings before cancellation penalties kick in. To be eligible, you’ll need to sign up for a $99 annual Tablet Plus membership that also gets you access to upgrades and daily breakfasts, among other extras at certain hotels.
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