You’ve probably seen this advertised on other blogs, but in case you haven’t, there’s a new luxury hotel club that is offering free membership for the first year, but only through October 31 (Monday). I haven’t spent any time at all looking into whether or not Club1Hotels really delivers on their promises, but Miles to Memories says that they seem to have good prices for luxury hotels, and Doctor of Credit says that he found better prices with Club1Hotels than with other providers. Meanwhile, MileNerd has concluded that Club1Hotels sucks. Which is right? No idea. The good news is that it doesn’t really matter since initial signup is free if you do it now. UPDATE: See comments of this post for arguments on the “it sucks” side.
In other words: You might as well sign up now (before Nov 1) while it’s free. Then we can discover later whether the service is good or bad.
Background
Club1Hotels is a private Global Luxury Hotel Club which claims to be the cheapest way to book 4, 4.5 and 5-star hotels. Most hotel booking sites (Expedia, Kayak, Trivago etc) take a cut of the rate that you pay for your stay. Club1Hotels says that they’ll give you wholesale rates with NO mark up. They instead make their cut with their annual membership fee. They claim that savings on higher end properties are usually between $75 & $150 PER night.
Their membership normally costs $675 for a year, but they’re currently giving away one year memberships that provide access to these hotel and airline discounts (but don’t come with a Priority Pass).
And $50 off by Sunday Night
This weekend, Club1Hotels are also giving members $50 off their booking fees on any bookings made before Sunday at midnight. (This includes new members too who make a booking)
In addition November 1 Club1 Hotels will be launching a referral program where you can refer friends and family members and get $100 for every member you refer and the new member also gets $100.
Click here to sign up for a Club1 Hotels Free 1-Year Membership while it is free (no credit card required).
Disclosure
They setup a unique signup page for Frequent Miler readers. I have no idea whether this leads to any compensation for me. I’ll update this once I find out. I will receive $4 per free registration.
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Over the past couple of days, I have repeatedly tried to find hotels for Bangkok, but it just keeps searching and searching over again, then timing out-not even a “no hotels found.” I think one time I got some NYC hotels to show up after I searched there, but this is pathetic.
You should donate your commissions from this to charity.
I’ve updated this post with commission info that I didn’t know about before (finally got an email response from Club1Hotels) and added the following in the first paragraph:
UPDATE: See comments of this post for arguments on the “it sucks” side.
@Loyal FM Reader: I don’t care at all about the $4 commission. I’ll happily donate it all to a good cause, or whatever. If it wasn’t for MileNerd’s post suggesting that bloggers were promoting it for income, I wouldn’t have even known that there was ANY commission. But, I’m not sure it makes sense to take down the post. Don’t you think it’s still good advice to sign up for this just in case it turns out to be a good deal in some situations? I don’t see the down side. I agree, based on Anita’s and Raffles’ observations that it is unlikely to offer good deals, but even if there’s just a 1% chance, it seems worth the 10 seconds to sign up. What am I missing here?
It is a scruffy, confusing site. When the same hotels are appearing twice – at different prices – in the same list of results you’re in trouble.
Frankly I wouldn’t trust them enough to honour my reservation or those of my readers. Or indeed to pay me 1000 or so x $4 for plugging them.
As I look over at the shoe box full of old credits that I have applied for, for myself and my family over the years, using your affiliate links, I an reading this post for Club1Hotels. #disappointed
In the words of President Ronald Reagan, “Mr. Gorbachev take down this POST!”
Greg your credibility here at FM is worth more than a $4 commission.
[…] Free luxury hotel club membership through October 31 (and $50 off bookings this weekend) […]
$50 off booking fees?
It sucks. Do a search. The same hotels appear multiple times under different name spellings. I had hostels appearing. The number of high end hotels is quite small as a % of their inventory.
Even TPG refused to promote it 🙂 That’s how badly it sucks.
I turned it down and it cost me at least $5,000 to do so.
This is a new genre of advertorial called “confused advertorial”
I have been looking for a hotel in NYC the last few days so I took the opportunity to compare to the Club1Hotel.
At first blush it looked like a good deal, until the 28% “booking fee” was added on the final booking page.
This could have been user error, but several times during my searching I had to reset the dates as I noticed it had shifted to the weekend following my travel dates.
Anita