Hyatt Discounts

There I was in my room at 1am trying to find a nicer or cheaper hotel for my Holy Week trip in April to Cali.  I was checking around and found the HYatt at Ontario Mills which seemed like a really nice place to stay.  The prices were pretty high at abotu $130 a night, but then I saw this little "guaranteed lowest rate" link on their site saying that hyatt.com will have the lowest rate online, and if it doesn't, then they will match whatever lower rate you did find and discount it another 20%.

That actually wasn't hard to find and found it using expedia.com where it was cheaper.  Called the number to get the low rate guarantee and spoke to Tori.  Gave her the details of my trip and told her where I found the lower price ... she put me on hold.  And there I sat on hold ... for about 15 minutes.  I was here wondering if this was their technique, that when you call you tell them that you found a lower rate and you want them to match it and 20% off, that they will just put you on hold for x number of minutes until you hang up or your battery dies.  Well ... my battery started to die and I had to find my charger to make sure that it didn't.  She finally came back on the line telling me that she was doing paperwork for the discount and I was correct with the 20% ... then she put me back on hold for another 10-15 minutes again!  Here I was twidling my thumbs and just waiting, at this point I thought they were changing their site to get the same price and get out of the ad they put up.  She finally comes back and takes my reservation for about $85 a night (not including taxes and fees), well that was a huge drop from the $130 a night that I originally was quoted at!  

So the lesson for this is ... do some research when booking online at hotels, cars or anything.  You can find coupons, and deals, and you can also find low rate guarantees like this!

I think part of the reason they put these guarantees up is because a lot of people are reluctant to call.  At first I didn't want to call them and ask for the discount because I thought I might be wrong, or that it might label me as a cheapskate.  But really who am I to care what they think?  And it's saving me money!

The hotel looks nice and looking forward to the trip in April.  Good to get a discount on it too ... I might actually call my car rental place to ask for a discount or a deal :)

+ mon