links from the web: what hotels have to offer, vancouver airport efficiency, loosing hotel bibles, air france and ebola

1) view from the wing summarizes some interesting points on a publicly available document that details what holiday in express hotels must offer. back in december, he did the same for best western hotels.

2) vancouver airport is canada's most efficient airport according to the ATRS global airport benchmarking report. while it sounds nice, it doesn't actually mean much for the consumer. it simply compares output (number of aircraft movements and passengers, non-flight revenues) to the input (number of full time employees and outsourced services. in reality, it is more a measure of cost efficiency rather than efficiencies for the traveler. in america, atlanta and oklahoma rank top in airports with more and less than 15 million passengers, respectively.

3) guests staying in travelodges in the uk will no longer have access to free bibles. "the company decided that having a Christian book in rooms did not reflect the country's 'multicultural society.'" i just remembered those bibles as one of the only books you were allowed to (and encouraged to) steal.

4) air france flight crews have petitioned against flights to ebola-stricken african countries. one of the things the airline says is that they screen the temperature of all passengers. and while that is fine, i wonder how effective this is when the incubation period, according to the ever so trustworthy wikipedia, averages 8-10 days. then again, i'm not really an infectious disease or community medicine specialist. 

hotels.com 10% coupon codes -- to use or to skip?

hotels.com typically has 10% off coupons all the time. you can find them everywhere. sometimes they use individual one-time use codes, other times they have a generic code that anyone can type in. recently, they released one for their e-mail subscribers.

it's clearly a generic code -- i can't imagine that i was so lucky to get a randomized code that spelled exactly CAVACATION. as above, you have to book by september 8 for stays between august 13 and january 31, 2014. the fine print says that this is not eligible for welcome rewards. this is exactly why these codes don't really offer much benefit to me.

welcome rewards is their reward program which gives you a free hotel night after 10 eligible stays. after staying 10 nights, your free hotel night stay is worth the average price paid for those 10 nights. this is a 10% rebate right there. so the choice is between whether to get the 10% up front or whether to hold off and redeem for a reward.

there are two reasons why i don't redeem up front:

1) there are times when i won't have a coupon but still need to book a hotel, and it would take forever for me to reach those 10 nights in order to get my free night reward otherwise.

2) sometimes, those rewards will void your big crumbs rebates since it's a coupon code you're using. sometimes it won't. if you don't use the coupon, you get 4.55% back on your hotels but that one free night won't earn you anything (obviously). sometimes, the coupons will allow you to earn rebates by accident. if that's the case, then you get the rebate on the lower final price. by not redeeming the coupon now, you will get a rebate on the higher total, meaning a larger rebate. that's what i end up going for.

but all that being said, the coupon code is there if you want it. you get the most bang for your buck by using the big crumbs link to purchase through hotels.com (not .ca). make sure you change your currency to canadian dollars and then everything will work as if you were shopping through hotels.ca.

an edmonton roadtrip -- three hotels to choose from ... i hope i made the right choice

i'm making a roadtrip to edmonton today. my goal is to stay in the downtown region as that's where friends are normally staying. so here are my three choices:

1) days inn edmonton downtown: close to my friends' places and their work, free internet, free parking ($10 value). bookable on hotels.com and paying in canadian funds. total hotel cost: $130. big crumbs offers a 4.55% rebate, and hotels.com's hotelrewards gives back 10%. it's a days inn ... i'm not looking for something fancy. i've stayed there before, can attest to its general cleanliness, and its no-frills kind of feel.

2) holiday inn express edmonton downtown: two-three blocks further from my friends' location, parking is an extra $10. free breakfast is included. i have gold status with the intercontinental hotel group, not that it gives any additional value. they were booked solid until yesterday, when probably due to weather and flooding problems in southern alberta, cancellations happened. i would never pay $180 + tax for a downtown hotel in edmonton of all places. to be fair, in most places, really. but they had a nice points proposition:

the maximum amount that i would be willing to pay at most for a hotel in that area would be around $150. the days inn satisfies that requirement. however, for an equivalent hotel, i could get it for 15,000 priority club points (roughly $1,500 in hotel spending). this is their lowest tier of spending. this gives an approximate value of $0.01 per point.

you can buy points for this reservation: 10,000 points for 70$, or 0.7 cents per point, no taxes added. (keep this in mind when you're being offered a chance to buy points -- points should never be sold at more than 0.7c per point!). the alternative calculation is to say that for a hotel that I would normally pay $150 for, i can get it for $70 and 5,000 points. so that's an 80$ savings in exchange for 5,000 points. that means that each of your points is worth $0.016.

note that with reward bookings (prior to july 1, 2013), there is no stay credits or point earning potentials.
 
3) four points by sheraton south. this hotel is located 5 miles away from downtown, offers free parking, and no breakfast. booking on the spg mobile app would yield a 500 point bonus and double starpoints. it would also yield another stay towards my quest for spg status. but it is 5 miles away!

in the end, i was cutting it close to the refund deadline time on hotels.com, and i thought that if i had to walk towards my friends' place, i'd rather be walking two blocks less. so laziness prevented me from booking a potentially great value for my 15,000 priority club points. there will be other opportunities in the future, i'm sure.

adventures in hotel bookings -- random updates

1) when i was talking about points hound the other day, i had said that it might be a good alternative because the rebates via great canadian rebates and big crumbs weren't reliable for the actual hotel websites. if you wanted hotel chain points and stay credits, you had to book on the actual hotel websites. after completing my stays at various sheraton hotels in march and april, i had yet to receive my 2.1% credit for my stays on either website. frustrated, i booked on points hound instead.

and then, in my e-mail this week, i find out that i was being too impatient:

great canadian rebates

big crumbs

so perhaps i spoke too soon. i'm definitely happy that my rebates came through!

2) i did actually book a starwood "double dip" stay on points hound. these "double dip" rates offer a few miles / dollar spent in addition to hotel chain points and stay credits. but what i completely forgot about was that there was a 500 point first booking bonus. it's credited to my points hound account and simply needs to be assigned to a partner program (like united mileage plus or american aadvantage). it's a super easy process.

you'll notice that my sign-up bonus was credited to united mileage plus -- that's because they were the only program to offer points initially. from here on out, i think i'll work on my american aadvantage account. i already have a small sum in aadvantage points, and i need an aadvantage account to dump all of my occasional oneworld points in. i still need to weigh whether 2 miles / dollar is equal to whatever big crumbs and great canadian rebates can offer me, though.

3) i was planning on doing another seattle mattress run during the august long weekend when i suddenly remembered that that is the vancouver pride parade weekend! it's always fun, and on a travel related note, during the parade over the last few years:

• westjet was distributing %-off vouchers
• flight center was distributing $25 off coupons for domestic airfare

and anyone who really knows me knows that i love my free stuff.

4) oh, and i just randomly found out that starbucks is having a $10 card for $5 from groupon. use bigcrumbs in order to get 5.6% cash back too.

points hound: earning bonus miles while still getting stay credits for hotel bookings

the problem with booking with third party sites (e.g., expedia, orbitz, priceline) for hotel bookings is that for the most part, you won't get any stay credits with the hotel chain that you've booked. despite paying probably the same price, there are no points earned or stays/nights earned for hotel status.

expedia and friends do have an advantage to them, however. usually, they have higher rebates on sites like bigcrumbs.com. if shopping through bigcrumbs, expedia gives a rebate of 5.6% back on hotel purchases, whereas for starwood properties, they give a 2.1% rebate on hotel purchases (if it credits at all). this is in addition to a 1-2% rebate via expedia's own points program. hotels.com offers a 4.55% rebate on bigcrumbs.com, in addition to an effective 10% return via their hotelrewards program.

what is pointshound?
points hound is an online, third party hotel booking service that provided an interesting proposition. you earn various amounts of points on your hotel bookings based on how many nights you've booked with them in the past.

it's not completely clear if it's 0-5 nights per year or based on some other time frame. and when they say 3-8x, they really mean 3-8 points earned per dollar spent. they have several partners you can credit your miles to: united, virgin america, american, delta, aeromexico, hawaiian, baltic, etihad, and us airways.

at a conservative 7 miles per dollar spent after 20+ nights, and assuming 2c value per mile, that's like getting a 14% return. if you had booked the same property on hotels.com (using canadian currency, thereby removing the forex fee of 2.5%), you would get 10% back via welcomerewards and 4.55% back via a rebates from bigcrumbs, or 14.55% total return. guaranteed cash. airline miles are never guaranteed.

pointshound and double dipping
but recently, points hound started to do something that was quite innovative. they've teamed up with the various hotel chains to allow users to earn hotel chain points and stay credits in addition to a reduced amount of airline miles. fantastic!

i'm planning on going to seattle for a weekend trip (as i usually do), and am interested in staying at a particular starwood hotel.

normally, you can earn 400 mileage plus points for a $159 hotel night, or slightly less than 3 miles/$ spent. this would not earn you any points with starwood. i would value 400 miles as being worth $8 to $16 (2-4 cents/mile). if i book through hotels.com, i would expect to get back $7.23 from bigcrumbs and $15.90 back from hotelrewards. so pointshound would not be that great. neither website would give you starwood points or stay credits.

but see that "double dip" icon in the bottom? that means that if you agree to earning a lower number of mileage plus points via pointshound, you can get rates that are eligible for starwood points and stay credits.

in this example, you can still get 350 mileage plus credits (just over 2 miles/$ spent), the hotel rate is different (AAA rate, which i'm a member of, and refundable), and you get the stay credit and starwood points. if i were were to have solely booked through bigcrumbs to get a 2.1% rebate for purchases made at spg.com, i would get $3.38 in rebates. i value 350 mileage plus points at $7-$14 (2-4 cents/mile). not bad. and as i haven't booked on bigcrumbs before, the number of miles could potentially increase as i climb that ladder.

i'll bite. i'll make a booking and see how it goes. hopefully the stay credit will come through!

(note: if you sign up with points hound using my link above, you get 250 sign up miles, and i'll get 250 referral miles after your first purchase).

on the road to status: sfo/hnl edition. this ain't no starwood ...

when i was booking the hotels for this trip, i had initially wanted to book one of the hotels that i had previously stayed at and enjoyed in san francisco. unfortunately, they were both sold out. so we needed a different plan.

we planned on arriving late at night on friday, and so we booked a four points by sheraton at the airport in SFO. the plan was afterwards to move from the airport hotel to downtown SFO for the following morning.

the four points at the airport wasn't luxurious by any means. the lowest available price at the time for the date that i wanted was around $250. however, it was only a category 2 hotel at the time, or 3,000 starwood points. this gave an average return of $0.08/point. and at 1 starwood point / dollar spent, that gave me an average return of 8%. a few weeks later, they changed its hotel cateogry to a category 3 hotel, meaning that 7,000 points were needed to redeem. so i was glad that i redeemed at the right time.

when we first got in at the four points, we weren't impressed. its stairs were out of order, we got a room on a low floor (no upgrade), and the room was a bit worn. but in all reality, it was good enough for what we needed. it was clean, the bed was comfortable, and it was free. 

we were supposed to move to the downtown region on saturday, and i had found this hotel with decent reviews in a great location. it was roughly $100 but because i managed to score best price guarantees from expedia, it was only $50 a night. an amazing deal. we went in and this is what we found:

there are two feet from the bed to the cabinet with a tv hidden inside of it. there's a chair that you can sit on in the corner, which is useful if you want to play hide and seek. given its location, i'm sure that no one's vacuumed underneath the chair for decades.

there's four feet from the edge of the bed to the rusted heating pipes that are permanently turned on. the window overlooks a raised, rooftop parking lot. there are three feet from the tail of the bed to the washroom.

if you sit on the toilet, your knees are a centimeter away from hitting the wall. the sink is located outside the bathroom, and so brushing your teeth in the morning will invariably wake up the remaining sleeping party.

so the four points by the airport? amazing in comparison.

we met up with some friends for dinner and we were talking about the joys of this hotel. one of them, a bona fide road warrior who puts in 260,000 miles a year on board tin cans, had told me the three factors that go into a hotel room: price, location, cleanliness. one should only aim for two out of three in order to be happy, he told me.

and so this hotel was an amazing value at just $50 a night. and the location was amazing, being just a few blocks from the BART station which also links to the airport. the area was also safe. but the room itself was not the best for two people. and so, as my friend suggested, i should be thankful that i scored two out of the three criteria for a great hotel. and really, given that we really only came home to shower and sleep, the room did its job. so i'm going to take my friend's advice and make that conscious effort to evaluate the hotel using those three criteria. i'm going to tell myself that i love it.  

but gosh, this is certainly not a starwood hotel.

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.

how to use expedia's best price guarantee

when it comes to hotels, i don’t really need the expensive, fancy places. i’m content with the regular two-star hotels that are close to things and that are clean. in expensive cities, the brand name groups (intercontinental, marriott, hilton, etc.,) are usually priced out of my range, so i don’t mind booking these two star hotels.

this is where expedia.com’s (not expedia.ca) best price guarantee comes in for me. most websites have a best price guarantee (BPG), but expedia’s is particularly generous. within 24 hours of booking, if you find another hotel on a different website for a lower rate, expedia will match it. but more than that, they will also “drop” a 50$ coupon into your account for use immediately for your next hotel purchase. that’s like a 50$ reward for reporting a lower price.

of course, there are some rules involved. the competing website must be in English and in USD. the room that is offered on the competing website must be exactly the same as the one you’ve booked on expedia.com. in other words, they have to have the same terms and conditions. refundable vs. non-refundable? breakfast included vs not? city view vs. mountain view? king bed vs. queen bed. special memberships required vs not?

it’s not always easy finding cheaper rates on competing websites. i find that you’ll typically get lower rates on smaller, independent hotels’ own websites. some markets have lots of these, others don’t. the aqua resorts in hawaii, for example, typically have lower prices on their own website than on expedia.

step 1: find a hotel on expedia.com that has a competing website with a lower rate. remember, this is where your small, independent hotels come into play.

step 2: if you have a multi-night hotel booking, break it into individual nights.

step 3: purchase your first night.

step 4: go to expedia.com and fill in the BPG application online.

click on the best price guarantee on the lower left hand corner

select the BPG application

fill in the details -- takes 3 minutes to do

step 5: you will get a partial refund (price match) and a 50$ coupon will be dropped into your account. use this coupon to book your second night.

step 6: repeat steps 4-5 for your second and third nights.

note that you can only get 3 BPG within a calendar month. so for longer trips, i typically wait until near the end of the calendar month so that i can do 6 within a short period of time. i did this just yesterday, and within a few hours, i received this e-mail:

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Thank you for contacting us about the Best Price Guarantee for your reservation. We have great news!

We have approved your request and initiated a refund in the amount of USD17.90 to the original form of payment used during your purchase. The time it takes to post to your account will depend on how quickly your credit card company processes this fund.

Meanwhile, due to system restrictions, we are unable to issue a Best Price Guarantee $50 Coupon via email. In this case, please call the Expedia Customer Service Team at the numbers below at a suitable time. Please have your itinerary number and email address available when you call.

If this does not answer your question or solve your problem, feel free to reply to this message or call us at 1-800-EXPEDIA (1-800-397-3342) or 1-404-728-8787 (for callers outside the U.S. and Canada) and reference case ID: x-xxxxxxx.

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i normally book my hotels in hawaii for 80$ base, or 95$ after tax. with this trick, i end up booking hotel room nights for 45-50$ a night. clean, safe, convenient, and all in hawaii. that’s a deal worth celebrating.