Making Travel Reservations with Discounts
It seems like everyone is looking for a deal when making traveling plans and everyone is going to the same places to find those deals these days. I don’t want to sound like your grandfather but back in my day if you wanted a deal you didn’t hop online and check five different sites to see which one offered you the best deal all within a ten minute span. You had to work to get those deals. Either you made the calls to hotels and attractions yourself to work out a deal or you dealt directly with a travel agent who had those deals already worked out and was able to pass those savings on to you. Those days are gone but the skills I acquired from those days of wheeling and dealing are not wasted my young Jedi.
I like to take the deals I get from online travel sites and push the envelope a little further by making the calls to the places I book and cancelling my reservations. You heard that right. Cancel your reservation and most places will work with you. You see the hotels that use those online services pay a fee to those services for finding them customers like you. If you book directly with a hotel or attraction you can not only get the discounted rate but it’s rather easy to get the hotel to give you the finder’s fee they normally pay to the online services as a further discount to you. These places would rather have your business at a discount than not have your business at all and because of that it’s rather easy to negotiate a deeper discount with them when you call them personally by way of the telephone.
I know this all sounds contrary to popular belief but it works and it works well. I can usually get on average a 40% discount off the normal rates a hotel offers to someone cold calling to book reservations at a hotel. Sometimes I actually book through an online service first and work out the details with the hotel afterwards or I will see the discounted rate from one of the online services without actually booking and then I will call the hotel directly to book with that knowledge in hand. Usually someone working at the front desk cannot make that kind of call on the spot, but a manager is never far away that they can’t put me in touch with them for the higher discount.
Sometimes telling the manager how it is wont work and in those cases you either have to accept the rates they give you or decide that a different hotel with a discount is the better choice but for the most part when you explain the situation in a calm manner they don’t have a problem giving out the discount. They are paid to make people happy and to get people to stay at their hotel at almost any cost. So if you approach it with a pleasant attitude and are not demanding you will see how easily they line up to give you discounts that ensure your stay with them is locked in.
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