On a typical junket reviewing hotels for the daily webzine Hotelchatter.com, managing editor Juliana Shallcross has discovered her share of unpleasant surprises. Hair in the bathroom. Used mini-soaps replaced into soaked packaging by housekeeping. And the absolute worst offender: unrelenting ambient noise.
At an otherwise perfectly funky little hotel in New York’s TriBeCa recently, Shallcross, 32, awoke to the rumble of the subway running directly underneath the building. And in Vegas, a $20 hotel on the strip that seemed a steal turned out to be surprisingly clean and sweet-smelling – but then “this weird generator noise” started around midnight, and wouldn’t quit.
“If it’s a noisy hotel, I think I’ll die,” she says, “because then you really just can’t sleep.”
Despite the risk of the odd unforeseeable defect, the editor still calls herself a convert to a trend called “blind booking,” which is a bit like playing hotel roulette.
At websites such as Hotwire.com, she pays for a room in advance, without knowing which hotel she’ll be staying in, and without being able to cancel or change the reservation. In return, she gets at least 55 per cent off the published rate – big risk, serious reward.
She estimates that blind booking – sometimes called “opaque booking” – has saved her hundreds of dollars over the past two years, with minor failings in some of the hotels, but no real horror stories.
Her first major score: She paid $100 for a casita in Palm Springs’s La Quinta Resort – more than half off the rack rate.
“It’s really scary at first because this is your credit card being charged in full,” she recalls. “It seems so final, but then you get such great deals.”
Blind booking began with Hotwire.com about five years ago, but lately it has taken off, especially among American-based booking engines. Hotwire cites a 53-per-cent lift in bookings by Canadians alone in the first quarter of 2010 compared with the same time last year.
Quikbook.com introduced “Secret Sales” this March, around the time Travelocity started its “Top Secret Hotels.” Expedia.com premiered “Expedia Unpublished Rate” in June. Expedia’s U.S. website uses inventory from Hotwire, which it owns, but Canada’s Expedia.ca doesn’t offer the new feature (although Canadians can blind-book on Expedia.com).
Auction sites offer something similar called “blind bidding.” Priceline.com has “Name Your Own Price” (the website shows William Shatner in a cheesy horse-trading pose); LuxuryLink.com began experimenting this summer with a “Mystery Auction” promotion to give away resort vacations for a dollar to one winning blind-bidder a month. And newly launched Offandaway.com boasts up to 90-per-cent savings for the crème of fantasy hotel suites (the Madison Premier room at The Carlyle in Manhattan, for instance).
There’s also a more cautious variant, called “private sales,” at sites including Tablethotels.com, Kayak.com, Jetsetter.com and two that made their debut in September – www.Sniqueaway.com and Voyageprive.com. The sites are free to join(membership is more like a marketing gimmick, since, for example, VoyagePrive, which began in Europe, has something like five million members by now). Members receive 35 to 55 per cent off last-minute stays typically – but the hotel is known in advance and the reservation can be cancelled. Tablethotels.com, in addition, sells a $195 (U.S.) upgrade to Tablet Plus status, affording lots of freebies, including breakfasts, wireless access, airport transfers, gym use, spa vouchers and more.
Hotels are still recovering from bookings, revenue and profit losses that hit hardest in 2009, and have turned to aggressive discounting to reverse the trend. According to Conference Board of Canada economist Maxim Armstrong, the Canadian industry earned $590-million in profits last year, less than in 2008. The average room, while 3.2-per-cent more expensive this June compared with last, hasn’t advanced beyond pre-recessionary pricing.
In that context, blind booking is “encouraging people to travel and use a room that would be empty otherwise, so that’s good over all for the industry,” Armstrong says.
There are obvious downsides. Last summer, Armstrong blind-booked a “decent four-star” Montreal hotel, but the website he used (and doesn’t wish to identify) would divulge only basic information about its hotels – he could narrow choices to the area of town and number of stars, nothing more. At least one friend of his who blind-books was burned when a room failed to live up to its star rating.
The uncertainty has given rise to communities such as betterbidding.com. There, blind-bookers try to improve their odds of scoring big on Hotwire and Priceline by sharing anecdotes and adding up paltry clues to which hotels are offered – there’s even a bulletin board for Canadian hotels.
Sussing out secret hotels “gives me a bit of a rush and I love it,” Shallcross admits. Over all, the odds are fair though. Sites tend to list semi-luxe or high-end places in urban centres, a business traveller’s sweet spot. And Hotwire.com’s four-and-a-half star hotels are a good place to start for first-timers because the outcome is usually a major chain – Hyatt, Hilton, Starwood – with a reliable business centre and possibly free Wi-Fi.
Shallcross, who flies frequently to New York, prefers Quikbook.com, which steers toward boutiques (she recently landed the Hudson Hotel, a worthy midtown Manhattan boutique hat featured mod, cheap chic-style interiors and a Philippe Starck-designed lobby). Expedia and Travelocity have Holiday Inns to pricey five-star digs.
Some sites also provide more details about amenities, such as whether a hotel has 24-hour room service.
But Armstrong doesn’t expect the trend to appeal to most mainstream travellers.
“You kind of have to be laid-back about seeing a new place,” he says, “and a little adventurous too.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
