100 Hotel Deals in 100 Hours!

One of my favorite ways to get cheap hotel rooms is via Extreme Hotel Deals. If you subscribe to their e-mail list, they’ll send you updated on ridiculously low rooms, such as the Hyatt Berlin, published this past summer for $13.

There’s a few things you should know about Extreme Hotel Deals, though:

• Sometimes the rates published are mistake fares and the hotel won’t honor them. Sometimes they will. Sometimes they aren’t mistake fares at all.
• The fares published are for random cities on random dates. So, you may get an email for a specific hotel in NYC with an amazing rate for February 22. The next day, you may see a hotel in downtown London for August 15.

Over the next 4 days, they’ll be publishing over 100 hotel deals – that’s about 1 deal every hour!

Here’s from their website:

We often find deals and choose not to advertise them because a reasonable person would assume they are actual mistakes, not just discounted rates. We thought it might be fun to publicize these as a kind of site challenge. So for the next 100 hours we will attempt to average a ‘deal an hour.’ That’s 100 total deals in ~4 days! No guarantees we can meet our goal but should be fun.

They will all be listed and updated on one single page: http://extremehoteldeals.com/100-hotel-deals-100-hours They will not go out in emails or twitter. There also will not be any set times; when we find one we’ll list it. We will begin at Noon EST December 9. If you want to help, post in the comments. Our preference would be these are all original finds rather than reposts from elsewhere.

We will only have the basic details without links or photos or long descriptions. Keep in mind that we have not investigated these rates. Booking is definitely a hotel lottery with lots of possible outcomes: the rates are honoured, they offer a compromise rate, the booking site offers compensation, you don’t know what will happen until you show up, they send you an email telling you to get lost!

Hotel rates are often a mystery. One day a property might have a $1/room flash sale and the next day unintentionally offer a $75 “mistake” rate they are mad at you for booking. A hotel can load its normal $100 rates on one booking site while elsewhere they offer the same rooms at $400 with no indication you are being ripped off for maximum rack rate. The whole process and comparison and terms are all very confusing and annoying… likely the reason they do it that way. For deal aficionados the opaque nature of hotel rates, as opposed to airfares which have become clearer and more uniform over time, is frustrating but also a bit exciting in its unpredictability. We have always viewed sites like ours as attempts to equalize the equation. The basic premise is that if hotels and booking sites want to play lots of games they should be held to the same standards they hold consumers to. If consumers so often lose due to the complexity, “terms,” inflexible “contracts,” etc., they should also sometimes win when the tables turn. So this page goes out to all you dice-rollers and dollar-room dreamers.