saving an additional 5-6% on hotels using bigcrumbs and greatcanadianrebates

when i was young and new to the internet, i signed up for a program called mypoints. at the time, you would earn points by clicking on links and then redeem those points for gift cards. i was 17 at the time, and i lied on the application form so that i would be 18 and thus eligible to participate. it was semi-lucrative for a high school student. there were months where for 10 minutes of clicking action a day, you'd earn a 10$ gift card. 10+ years ago, that was worth it for me.

one of the things that they incentivized was online shopping, where you'd earn x amount of points per dollar spent on online shopping. i wasn't a huge adopter of online shopping, and to be honest, i'd say that the vast majority of my purchases remain offline. even now, unfortunately, the earning potential of mypoints remain quite limited -- better offers for online purchases can be had elsewhere.

these days, there are two websites that i go to mostly for my online shopping, and i choose these particular sites because their referral bonuses are generally the highest. for canadian shopping, i go to great canadian rebates (GCR). for american based shopping, i go to bigcrumbs. (please note, both of these have my referral information in it -- if you'd prefer not to be referred, just type in the name of the website with a .com at the end). retailers pay the above mentioned websites a commission for sending traffic and sales their way. bigcrumbs and GCR then send a portion of that commission back to you. both of these sites pay via paypal, which i use all the time. there are lots of retailers that they pay rebates out for, but i mainly use it for travel.

in my previous post, i talked about using the best price guarantee on expedia to reduce the cost of one's hotel by 50$ a night. if you use bigcrumbs or GCR, then you can get a percentage of your base spending (after coupons but before taxes) back as a rebate, thereby reducing costs even more.

i typically use either expedia.com (for their best price guarantee) and hotels.com (although i change the currency to canadian dollars to avoid the exchange fee). via bigcrumbs, expedia gives you back 5.6% back in hotels, and hotels.com gives you back 4.55%. via GCR, expedia.ca gives you back 1.50$ back per air ticket (i book two one-way tickets instead of return), or 4% for hotels. these are all rebated back to my paypal which i then cash out to my bank account.

when we include this rebate, that 80$ (base fare) hawaii hotel is no longer 90$ all in.

• with expedia.com, that same hotel is 80$ - 50$ BPG (expedia.com) - 5.6% (bigcrumbs) + 10$ taxes - 1% (expedia rewards) = 37.92$ a night. 
• with hotels.com, that hotel becomes 80$ - 4.55% (bigcrumbs) - 10% (welcome rewards) + 10$ tax = 86.36$. 

the former is a big win. the latter, if nothing else, is a little bit of extra pocket change for the journey.