expedia foils my hawaii best price guarantee

one of my favorite travel tricks was to use the expedia best price guarantee. if you find an identical room (with identical conditions) offered on another american website in american dollars, they will refund the difference and give you a $50 travel credit. furthermore, you can use that $50 dollar travel credit on a room that you know in advance will qualify for the best price guarantee, and apply for the best price guarantee based on the pre-travel credit price. in effect, you've saved $50 off the price of your hotel night and will receive another $50 credit. on top of this, the purchases still qualified for the 4.8% rebate that bigcrumbs offered.

over the years, i've done this at least 23 times in the last three years, based on the number of used best rate guarantee coupons are in my account. the number is probably higher because sometimes, when they can't issue you a new coupon, they just re-activate an old coupon so that you can use it again.

what i've normally done ...
my typical hotel that i stay at is the waikiki sand villa hotel. it normally prices out to be $102.57 all in on the website, but typically hits $123.08 all in. so under normal circumstances, i would be able to use a best price guarantee coupon on the expedia price of $123, then get an additional $21 refunded from expedia, and then receive another $50 best price guarantee for some time in the future.

but this is how they've changed things ...
it's all about the wording, sadly. when you book on the expedia site, this is what it says:

when you book on the hotel website, this is what they say: 

in this case, expedia now takes the same room booking and guarantees a 4th or 5th floor. for the same price, you could get a smoking room on the 2nd or 3rd floor, which suggests to me that the 2nd and 3rd floor are smoking floors, but i don't actually know that for sure.

anyway, i only noticed this change after i had submitted my best price guarantee claim, and only after it was rejected:

Your itinerary shows the room description as "Located on the 4th to 5th floor in the main tower with views of Diamond Head volcano, mountains, or city" while "www.sandvillahotel.com" is showing "Rooms are located on the 2nd - 5th floors, excluding corner units". The price is reasonable to be higher for a room located on the higher floor and ahs views of Diamond Head volcano, mountains, or city. Due to this, we are declining your Best Price Guarantee claim.

what do i do now?
i guess all good things must come to an end. it looks like for the rest of my hawaii adventures in the future, i'll have to use up the remaining best price guarantee coupons that i have and then switch to other hotel websites.

• great canadian rebates offers a 4.0% rebate on hotels booked through expedia.ca
• expedia.ca charges in canadian funds, meaning fewer currency conversion charges
• great canadian rebates also offers a 4.5% rebate on hotels booked through hotels.com (which uses canadian currency)
• hotels.com offers its own 10% rebate program via hotelrewards, which is stackable with great canadian rebates 

thanks for the fun ride, though!