Hotel Tonight App — Does It Really Save You Money on a Hotel?
Getting a great deal on your hotel room is a trip hack that every traveler wants to get in on. One way you can do this is with a service that lets you take advantage of hotels’ unsold inventory of rooms and book them at deeply discounted rates.
This isn’t a new concept. Priceline has been around since the earliest days of the World Wide Web and travelers have been naming their own price for years. Hotwire has offered a similar service for many years as well.
Hotel Tonight Launched in 2010 during the smartphone era. The concept was simple: hotels could list any unsold rooms they had for that night on the app for last minute travelers to snap them up for cheap. Over the years Hotel Tonight has expanded their booking window from tonight to 7 days and recently to 100 days into the future.
For travelers who like to plan ahead, Hotel Tonight was never really an app worth paying attention to, but now that the booking window is fairly wide the question is: does booking a room through the Hotel Tonight app actually save you any money compared with what you could get if you booked it directly with the same hotel? I was skeptical but wanted to find out.
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I tested four sets of dates for hotels in Washington DC:
- One night tonight
- 2 nights during the upcoming weekend
- 5 nights a month out
- 5 nights 3 months out
I ran the first set tests on March 6, 2018. I was so surprised by the results that I ran them again about a week later on March 14, 2018 to make sure it wasn’t fluke. For the sake of simplicity, I only used the first 5 hotels that came up in the search and only compared the advertised rates (not including taxes and fees). All the hotels I tested were in Washington, DC.
The results of the tests are summarized below.
In a lot of cases, using Hotel Tonight results in substantial savings, in some cases almost 50% off (though in a small number of cases the app actually had slightly higher rates than a direct booking). Now, before you rush out and make a bunch of reservations with the app, there are some caveats worth considering.
All bookings made on Hotel Tonight are pre-paid and non-refundable. This might be perfectly fine for some travelers, but if there’s a chance you won’t make your trip then this could be an issue. There are also additional fees charged on these bookings, and in my tests the actual amount of the fees wasn’t always consistent.
For families or anyone needing a room with 2 beds, Hotel Tonight might not be a good option. The app only guarantees rooms for 2 adults and in my tests most hotels only had the “selected by hotel” option available for room type. At the end of the day, if the only rooms the hotel has leftover are the ones with one bed, then that’s what you’re getting.
If you have a favorite property or are loyal to a particularly rewards program, Hotel Tonight might not be a great option. Even though there are over 100 hotels in Washington, DC (and even more in the suburbs) only about 15 hotels show up in a given Hotel Tonight search. But if you’re not too picky about exactly where you stay, this might not be an issue.
Lastly, it’s worth keeping in mind that booking travel through any kind of 3rd party app, website or service could lead to headaches if anything goes wrong. When you book direct the hotel can usually resolve any issues on-site, but when a 3rd party is involved it‘s not always so easy.
Have you used Hotel Tonight? How did it go?
