This week we are sharing our 5 best tips to save money on hotels – yes, even luxury hotels!

1. Sign up for loyalty memberships! Hyatt, Marriott, Hilton, Best Western, IHG, Choice Hotels, Wyndham all have a membership program just like airlines do. They email offers for discounted rates & promotions and you can earn points on stays. When you rack up enough points you earn a status that gets free perks like free breakfast, free bottled water, early check in, late check out, free upgrades.
2. Use a credit card travel portal to book your hotel. You’ll earn extra points when paying for the hotel and those points can then be transferred to partner hotels to redeem for free stays!
3. Use credit card cash back offers. Chase Sapphire + Venture X both have credit card offers for cash back. For example, in March they were offering 10% cash back if you booked a hotel from Sheraton, Westin, or Renaissance Hotels.
4. Use annual travel credit from your credit card to get paid back for money spent on hotel. Our favorite card, the Chase Saphire Reserve gives you $300 back on travel expenses per year, that could be two free stays depending on the hotel!
5. Get a hotel-specific credit card like the Marriott Bonvoy & Hilton Honors which will make it easier to rack up points to redeem for free stays and get the annual bonus free stay every year.

See more of our travel hacks and advice here!

Tips to Save Money on Hotels

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Hey squaddies, The Travel Squad Podcast is back with Just the Tip, a new Friday mini episode series where we give you quick travel stories, hacks and recommendations to set you off into the weekend.

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Right today you have me, Brittany, as your host and I’ll be sharing our top five tips to save monies on hotels.

So one of the most expensive parts of a trip is usually accommodation.

And especially if you’re going on a long trip, accommodations can add up really quickly.

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So I wanted to share some tips with you that have helped me save some money when I book hotels.

My first tip for you is to sign up for loyalty memberships.

There’s so many different hotels out there that have a membership loyalty program.

You have Hyatt, Marriott, Hilton, Best Western, IHG, Choice Hotels, and even Wyndham.

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And when you do sign up for their loyalty memberships, you’ll often get e-mail offers and these offers can be for discounted rates or even promotions that they have.

So sometimes you know there will be a promotion for buy four nights and get the fifth night free or there might be a discounted rate for a last minute deal.

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Or they might have a destination specific location that they’re trying to promote.

So there might be discounts for that.

If you book directly through them, you will earn points on your stay and that’ll go into your loyalty account bank.

And then also this also gives you an opportunity to earn status for perks.

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So in the perks could be free breakfast.

You know, we love a good breakfast buffet, free bottled water upon check in, early check in or even late check out.

And then also one of my favorite perks is the free upgrades.

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Sometimes with the status that you have, you might be able upon check in to see if they are able to upgrade you into a better room at no additional cost because it’s one of the perks of your loyalty membership.

The second tip I have for you is to book your hotel through a credit card travel portal.

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The reason why you’d want to do this and why we do this often is to gain more points per booking.

So two of the most popular travel portals to book through are the Chase Travel Portal and the Adventure X Travel Portal.

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You can earn 5 to 10 times the points when you book through the travel portals through Venturex and Sapphire when you pay with your credit card.

So you may be tempted to go ahead and purchase this accommodation or hotel with your points, but don’t do that.

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What you want to do is book with your credit card so you can earn 10 times the points.

If you’re booking and using your points, then you don’t earn any points really on that.

So this is a better way to earn points faster.

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Just think about it, if you were booking a hotel for $100 a night, for that one night you’re getting 1000 points.

So you can really stack and bank points this way.

If you are in a pinch and you do want to redeem your points for hotel stays, you can definitely do that.

3:52

But like I said, you won’t earn the five to 10 times the points on that purchase.

A lot of the travel portal sites will also allow you to add your loyalty memberships into your travel portal.

So I’ve seen this on Chase and Capital One and even in Expedia.

However, it won’t give you more points but sometimes it counts towards how many nights you’re staying at their hotel and that can help upgrade your status in the future.

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Another way to save money on hotels is taking advantage of the cash back offers.

I’ve recently seen Chase Sapphire and Venturex both both have credit card offers for cash back.

So what I mean is when you log into your credit card account, usually there is like a button to the side that tells you that there’s offerings for different deals.

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So for example, in March, both Chase and Capital One were offering 10% cash back if you booked a hotel from Sheraton, Weston or Renaissance hotels.

So that’s a good way to save money because you’re going to get the 10% back.

So to really take advantage of this though, when you are on the credit card homepage, make sure that you hit select because it might be a feature deal, but you have to actually like activate it and select it for it to count.

5:09

So just keep that in mind.

So a little bonus to this is if you saw that Chase is offering 10% back at the Sheraton Hotel and you go directly to the Sheraton’s website, you know that if you use your Chase Sapphire card that you’re in your 10% back.

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But maybe it also pops up on the site Rakuten, which also pairs with Expedia.

But you can use this as a little stacking bonus because not only will you get the 10% back through Chase, but then you’ll get usually 3 to 6% back through Rakuten.

So if you haven’t already signed up for Rakuten and you don’t already have it like installed as a part of your web browser, highly do recommend that.

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I’m always, I’m clicking that to make sure I get cash back.

I can’t tell you how much cash back I’ve gotten over the years for all of the hotels that I’ve booked.

The 4th tip I have for you on saving money when booking hotels is to make sure that you’re taking advantage and using your annual travel credit from your credit card.

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So for example, with Chase, they have the Reserve card.

So the Chase Sapphire Reserve, every year you get $300.00 toward any travel expense.

So you can use that for a hotel.

And the Chase Sapphire Preferred Car gives you an annual $50 credit for hotels.

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So making make sure that you’re taking advantage and using your annual travel credits to the fullest.

In that same sentiment, Venture X also offers a $300.00 annual travel credit, but you have to book it directly through the portal versus the Chase cards.

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You do not.

And my 5th and final tip for you guys opening credit cards specifically that are based around hotels.

For example, there is a Marriott Bon Boy card and a Hilton Honors card.

So the perks of these is you earn more points per dollar when you book the respective hotels with the card.

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And those points can be anywhere from 7 to 17 times the points depending on the card that you have.

So you can really stack those points really quickly and easily.

If you have a hotel specific credit card, then it’s really easy to redeem the points for free stays at their properties.

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And if you’ve just opened the credit card, there’s often bonus offers for the credit cards when they’re newly open.

So free points or free reward stays.

We recently just opened the Marriott Bonvoy card and we have 5 free rewards nights, which is valued up to 250,000 points.

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So it gets us five nights at really, really nice hotels that I probably wouldn’t book otherwise if we didn’t have the free stay.

So it’s just something to consider as you evolve and elevate your travel gain.

I would highly recommend taking advantage and opening up some of these hotel specific credit cards.

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I truly believe that a hotel can really enhance your trip.

When you lie down at the end of a long day and you’re just on the comfiest, plushest, luxurious bed and you have the AC running, you’re under the covers and they have robes available for you to use.

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Like that is the life.

I used to say that the accommodation really didn’t matter because I was just there to sleep, but I feel as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten a little bit more selective about where I want to stay.

And so saving money on the hotels is really important to keep me traveling longer and for cheaper.

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So I hope some of these tips really help you out.

If you have any tips that you want to offer us, let us know.

We may feature in a future episode.

And I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode.

Thank you so much for tuning into just the tip.

Please make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and follow us on all the socials at Travel Squad Podcast and have fun traveling this weekend.