As a travel agent I get a lot of people asking me how to get the best hotel rates and the answer falls back on the traditional way of dealing with the travel industry. The goal Hotel Osnabrück of this article is to educate the general public so they can get the best hotel rates and to educate those reading this article about the different types of room rates that exist in the industry. These tips that I am sharing with you have the potential to save you several hundred dollars on you or your friends and your family’s hotel rooms from now on.

Travelocity from procurement

To get the best hotel price, tip number one should be that you ignore and blacklist all heavily advertised websites like Orbitz , Expedia and Travelocity to get your services. Once you do this you are open to more options and better deals that you can get elsewhere. These Internet agencies spend millions of dollars each year advertising for you to know about them, and when you do, they present themselves in a magazine, commercial, or paid ad at the top of the search engines with their written or spoken keywords to brainwash you choose to promote and target the general public.

What these internet travel agencies offer is an abusive and exploitative situation that they control by brainwashing the uninformed to read, listen and pay attention to their commercials. Internet agencies are not even considered true travel wholesalers, according to some industry experts who have been in business for 20 years or more. The hotels are approached by the internet agencies who don’t even buy the rooms from the hotels. Instead, they propose that they sell a certain number of rooms for the hotel with no time restrictions and that they receive rooms from the hotel at net price, which is a large travel wholesale amount in the industry. Travel wholesalers and consolidators need to prepay for the large volume of rooms they buy from hotels so they can resell them, so why shouldn’t these websites have to?

Exploitation situation in the general public begins

This is where the exploitative situation of the general public begins, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Once the internet sites get their own inventory of rooms to mark under their control, they go ballistic. They mark their prices at 60% to 80% of net price and in some cases over 100% when you add in all the useless service fees, fees and taxes. One would think that the internet agencies and the prices they sell would remain comparable and competitive and would be able to back up their hyped keywords that you read and hear in their promotions while releasing them to the general public in the millions of dollars of advertising, but they don’t.

In return, the hotel only asks for the net amount. The hotels are aware of this exploitative situation, which the majority of the public is unaware of. The hotels don’t support it, they are simply forced into it because they can’t afford the advertising spend of the websites; otherwise they would sell every single room themselves every day of the year. You may only get the best hotel rate by using one of the websites when the discount price is reduced by 30% to 50% and then the price is reasonably comparable to what is sold on the provider’s website. Aside from being sold a bunch of keywords that are completely inflated.

Secret to finding the best hotel rates

The second tip is the secret to finding the best hotel rates and saving the most on your vacation by resorting to the traditional method of using a travel agency, and the key is to find one that doesn’t require booking, service or charged transaction fees of any kind. You might be wondering where all the travel agencies are these days. The reason you don’t see agency swing doors anymore is because airlines slashed commissions years ago and over 200,000 agencies squatting business premises were forced to either shut down and close their doors and move to the internet where they could work from home. This is an important reason why travel agencies form the largest sector of the home office industry.

Working with an industry professional remains the best way to save money on hotel rates and just about anything you buy in life. As an industry professional, we work semi-automatically as it typically requires membership logins and passwords along with the correct industry credentials to gain access to specific databases filled with top notch discounts. Home based travel agents have the opportunity to obtain numerous different fare types and special offers to offer to the general public or their customers at such incredibly cheap deals on such a consistent basis. Premium offers cannot be posted on public booking engines. They must be sold privately.

Different types of tariffs that exist

The third tip that will show 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 that includes the standard room rate and traditional hotel inventory. These can be found on the hotel’s website and are sold by calling the hotel or the reservation call center. Sometimes the reservation desk sells cheaper rates than the call center, but they are still GDS rates by comparison. Agents use the GDS to determine how specific the other rates are in their total inventory of multiple rate types that they have access to.

There are different segments of the GDS, including the traditional Standard, Rack, Promotional, Government, Military, Corporate, Senior, and Premium plans, which my customers prefer. Premium rates are negotiated rates offered by the hotel to travel agents who reward them for their excellent booking history with them. Typically, customers save 25% to 30% on the premium type over the standard GDS rate. Promotional prices are like having the promotional code to get a discount if the hotel is offering one to the general public. The rest of the GDS is self-explanatory if you have the appropriate credentials to purchase it.

Most rewarding for customers

The next type of tariff is the most rewarding for customers. As I mentioned in the first Best Hotel Rates tip, I defined the meaning of a net rate as a wholesale rate. Wholesalers and consolidators buy large numbers of rooms, usually in bulk, from the hotel suppliers and receive a low wholesale price in return. The same concept applies to a company that sells its products in bulk to wholesale suppliers. The more that is purchased from the hotel, the better the chances that the consolidators will receive a lower net rate from the hotel.

Wholesalers then throw a small markup on the net prices so they can make a small profit and then we resell the net prices and distribute them to various hotel supplier databases for travel agents to sell to their customers and to the general public. Net rates are special travel agency rates that are usually prepaid and non-refundable. They must be booked at least 3 days before the customer’s arrival date. When you book a hotel reservation with a premier and net rate through a domestic travel agency that does not charge for their services, you get the best hotel rates in the world.

Tip four explains how you can make a travel agent’s job easier so that they can find you the best hotel prices. Spend some time preparing your itinerary for your agent. You need to know your desired check-in and check-out dates and the city you wish to stay in. Better yet, include the zip code you want to stay in so they can focus on a specific area so you can be as close as you want to be. Specify the number of rooms and beds you need and how many people you are traveling with.