$75 off Hotel Reservation Success!

A few days ago I wrote about an offer where you can receive $75 off a hotel reservation using the website Stayful. While I was semi-familiar with the site, I’ve never personally used it. The site specializes in booking boutique hotels at a discount 30 days out. Essentially, you put a “bid” on a hotel room and it is either accepted, rejected, or you’ll receive a counter offer. Currently, this site is giving new users the opportunity to get up to $75 towards a reservation with these two promotions:

• $25 credits: Sign up through a referral link (feel free to post your link in the comments section)
• $50 credits: Enter code SECRETSANTA in the “promo code” section. In your account, go to “My Credits” and scroll all the way down to enter the code.

This is a reminder that the $50 credits promotion code ends today! While you can always use the sign up credit used within 90 days of registering, the SECRETSANTA offer will expire today.

My experience…

I am looking to stay in New York City during New Years weekend and was able to find an amazing deal at a really nice hotel! I offered a bid for The Bentley Hotel for $150 and it was accepted. While the “suggested offer” price was $142 in my experience playing around with the site, the suggested offer price was hardly ever accepted and always gave another price. You can also use a 2nd account to attempt to figure out what the lowest accepted instant offer will be. I also didn’t mind this offer as the minimum amount you are required to pay after credits are taken off is $75. So if the hotel room was $142 (for example), I’d be paying the exact same price, just using less credits. After credits and before taxes are taken into consideration, you must be paying at least $75.

The $75 was immediately taken off from the total reservation and I was left paying just $101.00 total (tax included) for a night in New York City at a really nice hotel!

Prior to confirming the reservation, I checked with hotels.com to see what the lowest rate is through their site. As Stayful suggested, the lowest competitor rate for this hotel for $161/night. So not only did I get the hotel room for slightly less, I was also able to apply the $75 credit!

Some things to know…

After playing around with the site, there are many things I learned on how it works:

• You can only book a hotel room for 30 days out.
• After placing an instant offer on a hotel room, you are not locked into your bid. Once you receive an accepted or counter offer back, you can always decline and not pay for it.
• You can place bids 3 different times in a single city every 24 hours. You can place as many bids as you want throughout different cities.
• All hotel reservations are pre-paid. No cancelations allowed.
• Creating an account using Facebook log in is by far the easiest way. No email or phone confirmation is then required.

Overall…

This seems like a great site to use to book boutique hotels (assuming you are okay with non-flexible plans) and the $75 in credits really make it a winner! In my situation, getting a hotel room for $101 at a nice hotel is pretty amazing! You cannot do much better then that and using hotel points would not be even close to worth it.

Has anyone else had success using this site and getting a great deal! Remember, the $50 credit using SECRETSANTA expires tonight! You can sign up for Stayful here.