It’s no secret about our love for AutoSlash. For those who don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching the lowest rates for rental cars over and over up until the day of your trip, their service is the easiest way for you to find the cheapest rental car. If you’re not using AutoSlash, here’s 180 reasons why you should.
With that in mind, you can imagine how happy I was to see this email arrive the other day:
Greetings, as a previous user of AutoSlash, we wanted to invite you to be one of the first to check out our new HotelSlash service. In case you’ve forgotten, AutoSlash is a service designed to save you money on your car rental. Over the past 10 years, we’ve saved over one million people over $50M on their rentals.We’re so good at saving people money on car rentals, that many of our customers asked us if there was a similar service out there to help them save money on hotels. After looking far and wide, and not finding anything that lived up to our expectations, we decided to build the product ourselves. The result is HotelSlash!
The HotelSlash website is live, but the service is only available to those invited. Just another reason I love AutoSlash. They treat their customers well.
You can check out their pre-launch website at https://www.hotelslash.com/
Here’s how they say the service will work:
If you go to their website, you can enter in your email and they’ll let you know when the website’s services are available to the general public.
I had an upcoming hotel stay I was paying for, out of pocket, on a refundable reservation. Since I have access to the beta, I decided I would send the booking to them and see what they’d come up with.
Within 12 hours of me sending them an email, I received a reply.
My original rate for a four-night refundable stay booked through the hotel website was $564. The HotelSlash rate at the same hotel was $552. They found a similar room for $525, but that booking was non-refundable.
When I went to book a room, I had to do so from the HotelSlash website. I’d imagine these reservations are treated like any other OTA (Online Travel Agent) booking. That means that you’re likely to not get any loyalty points for the booking, nor will you get any of the perks of your status. Here’s what HotelSlash says about entering your hotel loyalty number for bookings made through their website.
While it’s not possible to enter your hotel loyalty program member number at the time of booking, many hotels will accept it at check-in or check-out time. While earning loyalty points on your booking is not guaranteed, it’s certainly worth asking the hotel if they will add your member number for you.
Is that worth it? I guess that depends on which hotel you’re looking at and your status level with that hotel chain. It would also depend on how much HotelSlash can save you.
With the hotel I was looking at, I would earn more than $12 worth of points from the reservation. That’s at a hotel where there are no other perks for loyalty and I’d be willing to trade the points for a lower price. If I had to give up lounge access or a lucrative promotion, there’s no way I would book through them unless the savings were extensive.
This is a single data point at an inexpensive hotel booking several months in advance. Can I tell from this how much HotelSlash can save on a hotel room in all instances? Of course not, especially since the website is still in beta testing.
I’m still excited about this development and I hope that HotelSlash ends up working as well at their auto rental site to save money for travelers. Since hotel chains do limit the amount of loyalty benefits on bookings through third party websites, this service will be best for those with no status with a hotel chain or if you’re staying away from your primary hotel program. Just make sure that the benefits you’re giving up (like free internet or breakfast) aren’t worth more than you’re saving. With this one, it looks like Your Mileage May Vary with the value of using HotelSlash.
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
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