Gondola is a free tool designed to make it easy to find hotels that offer the best value for your points or for cash. In the short time I’ve spent with it, it has already become my go-to tool for hotel trip-planning. I love that it shows cents per point for each hotel in its search results and that it lets you sort by point-value (not just by total point price like other tools). When clicking into a hotel, Gondola shows a wealth of really useful information to help you decide whether or not to book that hotel. If you decide to book a cash stay through Gondola, you’ll earn Gondola rewards in addition to any rewards you can earn from the hotel itself. And, best of all, Gondola promises to alert you if any stays you booked drop in price (via cash or points) regardless of whether you booked them through Gondola.
Overview
At its core, Gondola is a really useful hotel search tool. When you search for hotels, Gondola shows prices both in cash and in points, along with Google review scores. For points bookings, it also shows cents per point and whether or not that’s a good value. When you click into a specific hotel, the tool offers an incredible amount of information including the typical cash price and point price ranges for this hotel; benefits you can expect based on your elite status; user reviews; hotel policies; and fees (including resort fees, if any).
Gondola is designed to give you personalized recommendations and information. If you give it access to the email address that you use for all of your loyalty accounts, it automatically figures out your current point balance and elite status for each program. Further, it catalogs all of your past and future trips (at least those that have already been booked). Gondola is able to use this information when recommending hotels. For example, if you have a history of staying in a particular hotel brand, it may be more likely to recommend that same brand in new cities. Or if two hotels are equal in other ways, Gondola might first suggest the one where you have elite status. Gondola also offers an AI driven Explore feature which lets you find hotels based on open-ended queries. And, of course, the AI can use what the tool knows about you to make better recommendations. Gondola also uses your information to alert you to hotel price drops even if you didn’t book the stay through Gondola. All of that sounds fantastic, but I’m NOT a fan of the way they rely on email access to achieve these goals.
The email problem
When signing up for Gondola, the site requires you to give it access to your Google or Microsoft email account. Many tools do this just for authentication, and I think that’s great. The problem here is that it needs you to authorize it to read your emails. It does this in order to learn all about your loyalty memberships and past trips so that it can make personalized hotel recommendations. This bugs me for three reasons:
- It’s a security risk. I don’t like to give services access to my email inbox because I think it opens up a huge security hole: Many rewards programs and bank accounts let you click “forgot my password” and will send a reset to your email address on file. Bad actors could use this to hack into your accounts. Obviously I don’t think that Gondola is going to do anything nefarious, but I’d rather not be forced to trust them.
- It’s incomplete. I use a single email address for most loyalty programs, but not all. Gondola can’t see the other ones. Additionally, not all programs email all of the information that Gondola wants (such as current point balances).
- It’s sometimes wrong. I took a chance and gave Gondola access to my primary email. It now thinks that I’ve taken trips that I once booked and then cancelled. It also thinks I’ve taken trips that I’ve booked for others. The tool also shows me my future trips, some of which seem to have come out of nowhere.
I’ve discussed the security issue with the tool’s founder and he says that they’re working on some alternatives. In the meantime, if you’re concerned about security, the best option is to sign up with a junk email address that has never been used with important accounts.
Gondola cash back
One nice feature of Gondola is that when you make cash bookings you’ll earn Gondola Cash Back (which can be used towards future bookings). Unlike most other online travel agencies, these reservations are booked directly with the hotel so that you can manage your stay directly with the hotel chain and you can earn hotel points and elite credits.
Price drop alerts
Gondola uses its email integration to monitor which trips you book (even if you book outside of Gondola) and watches for price drops. You should get alerted if the cash rate or point price drops from the amount you paid. You can then rebook the stay for less.
I have not had a chance to test this feature yet, but it would be fantastic if it works well!
Try it out
Gondola is free to use, so its worth trying it out. If you’re concerned about the email issues that I described above, you may want to use a junk email account when signing up. This will let you try out Gondola’s excellent hotel search features but without personalized recommendations or price drop alerts.
Click here to sign up for Gondola (Disclosure: Frequent Miler will earn a commission on paid bookings if you sign up through this link)
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There is a very simple solution. Create a dedicated Gmail account for this purpose. Then set up a forwarding rule from your main account(s) to this account, of any email sent from supported hotel domains. Voila!
In order to earn loyalty program credit, Leading Hotel of the World might require booking via its portal rather than directly with the property.
I don’t have either Google or Microsoft accounts so that’s an impediment. What kind of cash back are we talking about on paid nights?
It’s about 2 to 3 percent. And, it’s a credit towards a future booking as opposed to actual cash back (if I understand it correctly).
Full email access to use a search tool is crazy
Not a fan – gave it 15 minutes of my life on a bot email – it came back with nothing but cash prices – checked all the right boxes and still no points prices. I could have done this search on my own in that time. What are they you paying you to promote this Greg? I have trusted Frequent Miler’s advice (for the most part) – now I’m wondering
Definitely sign up with a bot account.. no way im giving a convenience tool access to my emails.
Full email access? C’mon. There are numerous better ways of achieving the desired result, except for the apparent actual desired result of pulling a huge amount of your personal info to sell to advertisers. It’s kinda gross, I’ll pass