This article will explain in details about Hotel Promo Codes and how to find them.

Promo codes allows away for the public to receive a discount on a particular hotel booking or purchase. There are several ways to find good hotel promo codes, hotel coupons, and coupon codes however the biggest issue is finding one that works. I have personally search for codes in the past and spent hours after hours entering codes to find out they were expired or were assigned to a specific company or organization which can cost you more money in the long run (we will cover this later in this article).

Lets first discuss how you should go about finding Hotel Promo Codes. The first step would be to go to google and search for what you are looking for. Once you conduct your search you will see a list of companies show up including retailmenot.com, orbitz, coupons.com, goodsearch.com, groupon.com and several others. You can visit any of those sites to see if they have a code that could help you save money. There are also some great videos on www.youtube.com that will show you how to save big money on hotels.

There are several types of codes. Some of them could be issued from the actual company and some could be issued from certain corporations. If a code is issued from a company then typically it allows you to get a discount directly on their site at check-out. Simply enter the code and you will receive a discount. Although these types of promos work very well for businesses sometimes they may not work well for consumers. Let’s say for example you are looking for a hotels.com promo code and you find one on the internet for 15% off the rate. Then you go to that site and make your booking at the discounted rate. You may be excited because you just saved 15% off their price but in reality you might not have even saved a penny, matter of fact you could have been paying more when booking that property via that particular site. I am not going to tell you that this is the case with all codes but this is the case more often than not. Be cautious search around and make sure that you are getting the best deal before you even consider using the code. If the site you are searching has the lowest hotel rate on the net then it will benefit you to use the promo on their site. If they do not have the lowest rate then goes to the company that offers the best price.

Let’s talk about using a hotel promo code that is assigned to a company that you are not involved with and what it may cost you. Let’s pretend that you found a choice hotels promo code on the internet and the code was assigned to a company like AAA, AARP, Hotels Etc. and you used that code. Did you know that when you arrive at the hotel and they request to see your membership card or call to validate your membership status and discover you are not a member you will be charged full rack rate on that reservation. Rack rates are the highest rate scale that a hotel has to offer. These are the rates that are typically used in promotions. To give you an example, if you see a hotel advertising 50% off then there may be a good chance that they took the rack rate and just cut it in half. By doing this the consumer is actually only saving 5-10% OFF the BAR rates. It is very important to see if the discount is based off the BAR rates or rack rates. If it is based off the latter then I would encourage you to shop around because you are not really saving any money.

There are companies on the net that offer discounts based off the BAR rates. Now how do you tell the difference? That is where it becomes difficult as both companies basically advertise the same savings. The only way to tell is to read to see if it is off the rack rate or BAR rates. Let’s imagine 2 different companies advertising 50% off reservations. How do you know which one is real?  If the discount is based off the BAR rates then that is a TRUE discount, if the discount is based off the rack rates then that is a marketing scheme. There are not many companies on the net that gives discounts off the BAR rates but there are a few such as Hotelsetc.com

When you join programs such as www.hotelsetc.com you will actually gain access to an online booking engine just like the bigger sites such as expedia, Travelocity and etc. the only difference is their booking engine is already discounted so you can see the live savings at a blink of an eye (see picture). Before you go out and start wasting a ton of time and perhaps a great deal of money then I would recommend joining a reputable company and put that task behind you.