As a travel agent, many people ask me how to get the best hotel rates and the answer is based on the traditional way of dealing with the travel industry. The purpose of this article is to educate the general public so that they can get the best hotel rates and educate those who read this article about the different types of room rates that exist in the industry. These tips I’m presenting have the potential to save you several hundred dollars on hotel rooms for you or your friends and families starting now.
To get the best hotel rate, the number one tip should be to ignore and blacklist all the highly advertised websites like Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity to get their services. Once you do this, you’ll be open to more options and better deals than you can get elsewhere. These internet agencies spend millions of dollars each year on advertising so you will hear about them and when you do they will be featured in a magazine, commercial or paid advertisement at the top of search engines with their written or spoken word series. of brainwashing keywords. they choose to advertise and target the general public.
What these Internet travel agencies offer is a situation of abuse and exploitation that they control by brainwashing the uniformed people who read, listen and pay attention to their commercials. Internet agencies aren’t even considered true travel wholesalers according to certain industry professionals who have been in the game for 20 years or more. Hotels are approached by Internet agencies that don’t even buy hotel rooms. Instead, they propose that they will sell a certain number of rooms to the hotel with no time restrictions and that the hotel will give them rooms at the net rate, which is a wholesale amount for bulk travel in the industry. Travel wholesalers and consolidations have to pay upfront for the large number of rooms they buy from hotels in order to resell them, so why shouldn’t these internet sites?
This is where the situation of exploitation of the general public begins, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Once Internet sites get their own bookmarked inventory under their control, they go nuts. They mark their prices at 60% to 80% of the net rate and in some cases exceed 100% when you tie in all the useless service charges, fees and taxes that add up to everything. You would think that internet agencies and the prices they sell would still be comparative, competitive and could support their hyped keywords that you repeatedly read and hear about in their promotions as they send them out to the general public by the millions. of advertising dollars, but they don’t.
All the hotel requires in return is the net amount. Hotels are fully aware of this exploitative situation that most of the general public is unaware of. Hotels don’t support this, but are simply forced to because they can’t keep up with the advertising dollars that Internet sites spend; otherwise they would sell all the rooms every day of the year for themselves. The only time you can get the best hotel rate when you use one of the internet sites is when the price is 30% to 50% off and then the price starts to be reasonably comparable to what is being sold on the website. from the provider. Other than that, they are selling you a bunch of keywords that are inflated.
The second tip is the secret to finding the best hotel rates and saving the most for your vacation, go the traditional way of using a travel agent, and the key is to find one that doesn’t charge any booking, service or transaction fees. Type. You may be wondering where all the travel agents are these days. The reason you don’t see swinging doors for agencies anymore is because airlines cut commissions years ago and over 200,000 agencies that were occupying commercial space were forced to close and close their doors and moved online, where they could Work from home. . This is a big reason why travel agents make up the largest sector of the home based business industry.
Using an industry professional is and always will be the best way to save money on hotel rates and just about anything else you buy in life. As an industry professional, we operate semi-automated because it typically requires membership logins and passwords, along with the proper industry credentials to gain access to certain databases that are full of top-tier discounts. Home based travel agents have the ability to obtain numerous different rate types and special offers that they can offer to the general public or their clients with such incredibly low deals on a consistent basis. Premium offers cannot be published on any public booking engine. They must be sold privately.
The third tip that shows you how to get the best hotel rates is to understand the different types of rates that exist. The GDS is the Global Distribution System is the standard room rate and traditional hotel inventory. These are found on the hotel’s website and those sold over the phone at the hotel or reservations call center. Sometimes the reservation desk will sell cheaper rates than the call center, but they are still GDS rates by comparison. Agents use the GDS to determine how special other fares are in their overall inventory of multiple fare types they can access.
There are different segments of the GDS including Traditional Standard, Rack, Promotion, Government, Military, Corporate, Senior, and my customers’ favorite, the Premium fares. Premium rates are negotiated rates provided by the hotel to travel agents that reward them for their excellent booking history with them. Typically, the premium rate will save customers 25-30% off the standard GDS rate. Promotional rates are like having to have the promotional code to receive a discount if the hotel offers it to the general public. The rest of the GDSs are self explanatory if you have the proper credentials to purchase them.
The following rate type is the most rewarding for customers. As I mentioned earlier in the first tip on how to get the best hotel rates, I defined the meaning behind a net rate as a wholesale rate. Wholesalers and consolidators will buy a large number of rooms, usually in bulk, from hotel suppliers and receive a low wholesale price for doing so. The same concept applies to a company that sells its products to wholesale suppliers in bulk. The more you buy from the hotel, the greater the chance that consolidators will receive a lower net rate from the hotel.
The wholesalers then add a small surcharge to the net rates so they can make a small profit and then resell the net rate and distribute it back to various hotel supplier databases so that travel agents can sell it to their clients and To the general public. Net rates are special travel agent rates that are generally prepaid and non-refundable. They must be booked at least 3 days before the arrival date of the clients. Booking a hotel reservation at a Premier and Net rate through a home-based travel agent who does not charge for their services is the way to get the best hotel rates in the world.
The fourth tip explains how to make life easier for travel agents so they can find the best hotel rates. Spend some time preparing your itinerary for your agent. They need to know your desired check-in and check-out dates, as well as the city in which you want to stay. Providing the zip code you want to stay in is even better so they can zero in on a certain area so you can be as close as possible to where you want to be. Please include the number of rooms and number of beds you need and how many people you are traveling with.
By all means, be sure to include a short list of options you’re interested in staying with. If they don’t charge a fee for their services, try to be prepared to work more efficiently for you by giving them all the right information the first time. If you are traveling with children, you must indicate how many they are and their ages. As stated at the beginning of this article, my goal is to educate the reader on how to get the best hotel rates out there, and if you let the industry professional do the work for you, your results will be multiplied tenfold with success. that you get in saving money every time you, or your family and friends want to go somewhere.