Mystery specials

[Brucetiki]

For those that venture onto sites like wotif and lastminute.com.au, you'd be aware of some of the 'Mystery Rooms' they have - where basically you can save big, but all you know when you put the payment through is the star rating and roughly where it is (I've found wotif to be quite vague with locations whereas lastminute.com.au is a bit more specific).

Anyway I noticed one on lastminute.com.au for a trip I'm making to Sydney in August (3 nights, 4 days), which was 4.5 stars for $105/night. Waiting to save enough money to pay for it, it did go up to $115/night, but I was still happy to pay that. So put through the payment, and the hotel is revealed as Crowne Plaza Darling Harbour! I did a check on their website and their cheapest rooms for the nights we're there started at $165/night, and another site I checked out are charging $221/night!

So if you're not fussed on where you want to stay, and basically want to go on the star rating and a list of facilities in picking a place to stay, give the mystery specials a shot as you can make some big savings - we saved $150+ in this case!

[devilsadvocate]

Yeah mate, this is a great idea.
I worked in a 4-star hotel in Canada and I saw the insides of how these specials worked.

The company behind the website would basically book up huge blocks of rooms with 3-4 of the 4 star rated hotels in our area (Banff, Canada) for a discounted price. Obviously, from the hotels perspective, it's far easier to just sell 25 rooms for 12 months to say lastminute.com and let them do the hard work in generating bookings, taking payment etc.

This works well for a consumer like you and I when bookings are low. The hotel's contract is to provide the best available room. So in our instance, we had 5 levels of rooms. Suites with spa, suites without, superior with balcony, superior without balc, standard. Generally, if the hotel was fully booked, the website company would be allocated our standard rooms or the superior without balc. But if it was quiet, we'd give people our superior rooms with balcony and offer upgrades to a suit for $50-$100 per night.

So if you'd bought one of these deals for say $120 per night and the hotel was quiet, for $50 extra at check-in you could be in a suite with a spa!! Compare that to a walk-in guest. They would ask for a room. Std room prices were $179, a seperior with balcony $269, a suite was $350-$400. We were allowed to drop the price to $149 for a std room, $199 for sup-balc or $300 for a suite. So as you can see, the website deals are awesome for some lucky guests. I'd highly recommend them

[devilsadvocate]

Another example of this type of deal being a gem, screwed us over in Switzerland. I'd always dreamt of having a white Christmas in Zermatt, Switzerland. So the missus and I booked a trip well in advance thinking we got a good deal. We paid 700 quid each for flight, transfers, 6 nights accom and all breakfasts/dinners in a 4 star traditional swiss lodge as a bit of a splurge given it would be our 1st Christmas away from family. We booked it all through Flight Centre in London.

When we got to the lodge, we were grouped with an Aussie family doing a similar trip to us. To our dismay, they'd only jumped on it as a last minute trip, booked through the tour company Inghams (A UK package tour group). They'd paid 220 quid per person for a package deal to Zermatt in minimum 3 star accom. They were upgraded to our lodge for free. So we'd paid 500 more EACH for the same damn thing!

We had no idea that we'd actually been placed on a package tour, but I suspect that was probably less work and higher commission for the agent. Still, it was a cracking trip and Inghams were great, but I'd probably book direct with them if I had my time over. Then buy a whole new Snowboard/bindings/jacket/pants etc!!