The power of hotel price guarantees is something that often goes overlooked, but I get it: Getting a Best Price Guarantee honored can sometimes be an exercise in frustration. I recently had a go with a Hotels.com Price Guarantee claim that had me literally laughing out loud with each declined claim over a period of several hours, but once I got invested I just couldn’t stop myself from going the distance. Eventually, my Price Guarantee claim was approved. I’m sharing the story first so you know that you’re not alone when you find yourself trapped in the farce that is a Hotels.com Price Guarantee claim and also with the hopes that maybe I have a small tip that could help you persevere.
The short story
- I booked a hotel via Hotels.com and found a lower price elsewhere
- I submitted several price guarantee claims that were denied repeatedly
- I finally had success after providing both a screen shot and a direct link to book the lower rate.
- In the end, I’ll get $224 in OneKeyCash from the claim and I got to book through Hotels.com, which was my preferred method for this booking.
The full story
I wanted to book through Hotels.com to use Capital One Shopping Rewards
I recently had occasion to book a hotel that isn’t part of any major loyalty program. After poring over options for hours (Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts / The Hotel Collection, Capital One Premier Collection / Lifestyle Collection, Mastercard Travel & Lifestyle, AAHotels.com, LifeMiles Hotels, Rocketmiles, and probably about 19 other things), I settled on my best option being Hotels.com. That decision was influenced in part by the fact that my wife and I still had a bunch of Capital One Shopping rewards to redeem (reminder: Capital One Shopping is a public shopping portal, no Capital One card required). We could redeem our remaining Capital One Shopping rewards for about $1400 in Hotels.com gift cards to cover the majority of the cost of our stay. In total, the booking would cost about $1,821 through Hotels.com.
Because I primarily travel using miles and points, I rarely spend so much “cash” on a single hotel booking. I wasn’t particularly interested in paying cash out of pocket for this hotel in part because I wouldn’t be earning any sort of hotel rewards or elite night credit, so I was happy to redeem Capital One Shopping rewards to cover the majority of the cost.
Sweetening the pot by “seasoning” my browser for Capital One
To sweeten the pot a bit, I clicked around Hotels.com in the Google Chrome browser profile where I have the Capital One Shopping extension installed. We have anecdotally found that Capital One sometimes provides targeted offers for stores where you’ve recently clicked around using the browser where you have the Capital One Shopping extension installed. Just to give that a shot, I spent some time clicking around Hotels.com a few nights ago, but stopped short of making a reservation.
The very next day, I received a targeted offer for 7.5% back on Hotels.com.
I don’t know for sure whether that will stack with using gift cards and making a price guarantee claim, but I clicked through because it gives me a shot at getting $100+ in rewards.
The Hotels.com Price Guarantee process
If you want to file a Hotels.com Price Guarantee claim, you go to this page and fill out the form any time up until 11:59pm local hotel time the night before check-in.
Based on my experience, I recommend inserting a URL link in the box for “Source of lower price” rather than the name of the website you used. I originally provided the name of the website and some brief text explanation, but in hindsight that box should have been a direct link.
As you’ll see in a moment, the turnaround time on my claims was surprisingly quick, but the success rate was surprisingly low.
Hotels.com Price Guarantee claim, first attempt
I had shopped around before booking via Hotels.com. I wanted to book via Hotels.com to use gift cards from Capital One Shopping, but I was prepared to make a Price Guarantee claim as soon as I booked.
Immediately after booking, I tried submitting my price guarantee claim. On my first attempt, I used a booking site called Prestigia.com that I found via hotel search consolidator Trivago. I’d never heard of Prestigia, but that site had the best price per night. Note that the rates below were for a base room without breakfast, so you’ll notice higher rates with my claim in a moment.
When I clicked through from Trivago and selected the rate plan I wanted (with breakfast included), the total with taxes & fees came to just over $1600 — a little more than $200 less than the Hotels.com price.
That said, I wasn’t very confident that this claim would be approved due to two rather large potential issues:
- I could only get Prestigia to show this price when clicking through from Trivago. Going directly to Prestigia.com yielded a total price just under $1800.
- As you can see in the screen shot above, the booking would be charged $89.49 by Prestigia immediately, with the hotel to charge the rest separately at some point afterwards.
I expected both of those to be problems because the Hotels.com agent handling my claim probably wouldn’t try to replicate the deal through Trivago but would rather go directly to Prestigia.com, where they wouldn’t find the same ~$1610 price. I also thought that getting charged in part by Prestigia and in part by the hotel directly (and not all in one transaction) seemed like space to deny the claim based on terms being different from Hotels.com (which would make one charge immediately).
Still, I figured it was worth taking a swing. I filled out the Hotels.com Price Guarantee form on this page.
For the “source of lower price”, I wrote in sentence form that I found the lower price via Trivago, clicking through to Prestigia.com. I was surprised to get a response within about 7 minutes from submitting the claim! I was less surprised that it got denied as follows:
Hello Nicholas,
Thank you for contacting us regarding your Hotel Price Guarantee claim.
We’ve reviewed your price guarantee request and want to provide an update.When we receive a price guarantee request, we take steps to validate the claim that’s been submitted. In accordance with our Price Match terms and conditions, all requests are subject to our verification. Today’s online marketplace is constantly changing, with sites coming and going quickly; many being legitimate businesses and others are not. Unfortunately, we have checked the travel website you have provided to us and we were not able to verify it as a legitimate website.
No worries, if you found a lower rate from one of our competitors, do not hesitate to submit your claim up until 11:59 PM (23:59) a day before check-in, hotel time zone.For more information, you may review the terms and conditions of Price Guarantee at “https://www.hotels.com/
customer_care/pillar/price_ guarantee.html“. Sincerely,
I started to draft a response about how Trivago is reputable and actually does more in annual revenue than Hotels.com, but then I Googled Prestigia.com. I wasn’t encouraged by what I found — most results as I scrolled the first page of Google noted that the site was a sham and that Prestigia would take their piece of the payment and then not confirm the reservation or try to bait and switch (I don’t know whether that’s the case, I’m just saying that I saw a lot of negative reviews). I felt like I couldn’t argue that Prestigia was reputable after all — and I also figured that maybe I could find another comparison point with a little effort and just submit a new claim.
Hotels.com Price Guarantee claim, second attempt
Sure enough, I found a couple of options after looking through a handful of hotel comparison sites like:
One oddity that I ran into when using these sites which won’t be applicable to all readers (but which was very much applicable to me): the comparison site search results weren’t always accurate for the number of kids in my room. Having a family of four, I was searching for 2 adults and 2 children and entering the ages of my kids in the search consolidators. The hotel I wanted to book had a Junior Suite that could accommodate 2 adults and 2 young kids. However, a room that accommodates 4 adults was more than twice as expensive.
After some hunting around, I realized that the hotel search sites above had varying success in passing along the guest ages. I eventually realized that some of their partner hotel engines were showing the price for the Junior Suite I wanted with 2 adults and 2 kids and others were showing the price for 4 adults, which was far more expensive (for what it’s worth, I found prices at Rocketmiles and associated sites seemed to be assuming 4 adults rather than 2 adults and 2 kids, which made a huge impact on pricing).
All that is to say that even though some sites showed a price of $674 per night on one of the above hotel consolidators, once I clicked through and entered the number of adults and ages of the kids, the pricing was in the ~$300 per night range similar to other sites. That wasn’t the case every time, but it happened quite a few times.
I found a rate at Booking.com with a price of $1623 for my 5 nights. I submitted a screen shot for another price guarantee.
I was surprised by the response I received about 7 minutes later.
Hello Nicholas,
Thanks for contacting Hotels.com.
We’ve reviewed your price guarantee request and want to provide an update.
Our price gurantee benefit only applies when the lower rate is available for booking. Since the claim you submitted doesn’t show a lower price, we are unable to process your request.
No worries! If you found another lower price on another travel booking site, feel free to submit a claim until 11:59pm the day before check in.
You can find more information in the Terms and Conditions on our site: https://www.hotels.com/
customer_care/pillar/price_ guarantee.html.
Sincerely,
I didn’t understand that since I had indeed submitted a screen shot showing the price of ~$1623 all-in, so I pushed back via email:
Hello,
Thank you for taking the time to review my question and respond.
However, I’m confused. I provided a PDF of the booking page that clearly showed the price for 2 adults and 2 children with breakfast included. I’m attaching both the page I submitted to you and the final checkout page where it is indeed available for booking right now – see that I could enter credit card information.I appreciate your time and assistance in reconsidering my claim as this is indeed available for booking at a lower price.Sincerely,Nicholas Reyes
Exactly 8 minutes later, I received the following response:
Thanks for contacting Hotels.com.
We’ve reviewed your price guarantee request and want to provide an update.
Our price guarantee benefit only applies when the lower rate is available for booking. Since the claim you submitted doesn’t show a lower price, we are unable to process your request.
No worries! If you found another lower price on another travel booking site, feel free to submit a claim until 11:59 PM local hotel time the day before check in.
You can find more information in the Terms and Conditions on our site: https://www.hotels.com/
customer_care/pillar/price_ guarantee.html. Sincerely,
I had to laugh. How were they not seeing the price? At that point, I started to wonder if these responses were just from an AI bot. For starters, the consistency of response time (7-8 minutes each time) seemed odd. The sameness of response / lack of recognition that my screen shots did indeed include a price made me think that maybe this was all a big farce with Hotels.com never approving a guarantee simply because they perhaps didn’t have actual humans reviewing submissions.
Still, I was invested, so I pushed back:
Hello again,
Thank you for your response.I don’t understand what you mean — the screen shots I am providing DO INDEED SHOW A LOWER PRICE. See the price I have pointed to here with multiple red arrows and find that same price — $1,623.15 — in both of the screen shots attached.
I appreciate your time and assistance in reviewing my claim.Sincerely,Nicholas Reyes
I bet you won’t be surprised by the response I got for a third time (although this time it took 13 minutes to receive a response, deflating my AI bot theory somewhat, while repeating an earlier spelling mistake on “guarantee”, which led credence to the AI bot theory):
Thanks for contacting Hotels.com.
We’ve reviewed your price guarantee request and want to provide an update.
Our price gurantee benefit only applies when the lower rate is available for booking. Since the claim you submitted doesn’t show a lower price, we are unable to process your request.
No worries, if you found a lower rate from one of our competitors, do not hesitate to submit your claim up until 11:59 PM day before check in.
For more information, you may review the terms and conditions of Price Guarantee at “https://www.hotels.com/
customer_care/pillar/price_ guarantee.html“.
Sincerely,
I had to laugh and question whether I was engaged in the email equivalent of a staring contest. I was confident that I could out-stare them. Each response I’d gotten had come from a different person. Interestingly, all of the responses included an employee ID of the person responding. I figured that there must be so many people handling these claims that if I just kept swinging, I was bound to get a hit at some point.
However, I also decided that it was time to switch it up and try a new claim.
Hotels.com Price Guarantee claim: third time’s the charm
I found another cheap site through Skyscanner that also showed a price of around $1610 all-in. Like with Trivago, I could only find that price by clicking through from Skyscanner. Still, I was looking at this as like batting practice — I just had to keep my form and eventually I’d connect.
I submitted the claim, but much to my surprise I didn’t receive an immediate response. This time, it took at least 30 minutes — and at that point I had already gone to bed for the night. When I woke up in the morning, I was surprised by a different email response:
Hello Nicholas,
We’ve reviewed your price guarantee request and want to provide an update.
To process your price guarantee request, I’ll just need a bit more information. You can reply to this email with the following:
Link to the alternative quote
Screenshot of the alternative quoteSincerely,
It was a breath of fresh air to get a response that didn’t feel pre-programmed! I still didn’t feel immensely confident, but I felt like they were telling me that there’s a chance.
I don’t know whether I had forgotten to attach my screen shot on the initial claim (I certainly thought I had attached the screen shot when I submitted the claim, but maybe I had forgotten?). Still, I had a screen shot so that part was easy.
Trickier was the fact that I could only find the price when clicking through from Skyscanner. I knew that if I only provided a link to the Destinia.com home page, they weren’t going to find the same price (and in fact, perplexingly, I couldn’t even click through to a payment page when starting on their home page but rather only when arriving at Destinia.com via Skyscanner).
I wondered if perhaps I could right-click on the link from Skyscanner and choose to “copy link address” and somehow get a direct link to the search result.
That sorta worked. I was indeed able to get a ridiculously long URL that, if pasted into a web browser, did redirect to Destinia with my selected hotel and dates and rates.
However, clicking that link first brought up an intermediary page from Skyscanner to Destinia.
I had a feeling that might get denied since the URL was for Skyscanner but the site offering the lower price was Destinia.
However, when it finished redirecting to Destinia, I noticed that the link was really just bringing me to search results for the city in question with my preferred property listed first.
I noticed that the URL at the top of the page ended in “date_unix=XXXXX” (where the X’s represent a long number that had many more digits). I had a feeling that perhaps that specific combination of numbers was set to enter exactly my search parameters into the search engine and would thus pull up this result again.
Sure enough, that link did work in multiple browsers to bring up exactly my desired property and dates. I decided to give it a shot.
I wrote back providing the link and a new screen shot explaining that the updated price was now $1,610.91 all-in (I think the price changed a little after submitting the initial claim based on currency fluctuation).
At this point, I was mostly continuing to participate for the entertainment value with no actual expectations, but I was delighted when I received the following response approximately 45 minutes later.
Hello Nicholas,
Thanks for contacting Hotels.com.
We’ve reviewed your price guarantee request and found a lower base rate on Destinia.com amounting to USD 1,359.99. Once your stay is done, we’ll add USD 224.20 in OneKeyCash to your account for the price difference.
The OneKeyCash will be available in your account within 72 hours of check-out and can be used for future bookings on Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo.
You can find more information about One Key price guarantee in the Terms and Conditions on our site: “https://www.hotels.com/one-
key-terms“. Sincerely,
BINGO!! We have a winner.
I had forgotten that Hotels.com matches based on the base rate before taxes. I think that’s because most OTAs hide their fees in with the “taxes” and Hotels.com doesn’t want your price guarantee claim to be successful based on another OTA beating their fees (i.e. charging the same base rate but significantly less in the “fees” portion of taxes & fees). Instead, they compare the base rate before taxes and fees.
In my case, that actually worked out to be a small additional win because the all-in price difference was $211, but because the other site had slightly higher taxes & fees, the base rate difference was actually $224.20.
I’ll get that difference back in OneKeyCash that I can use on a future booking on Expedia, Hotels.com, or Vrbo. That’s not as good as a cash refund of the difference, but I certainly won’t complain! My booking was originally set to earn ~$31 in OneKeyCash. I’m not sure whether this claim will change that or invalidate it, but since the price guarantee happens in the form of added rewards rather than a reduction in price, I suspect that I might also get that $31 for a net total of $255 back on this booking. If I also get the 7.5% back from Capital One Shopping, I’ll end up with another $100+ in rewards. In fact I do see that cash back pending in my Capital One Shopping account under the “help” tab.
At the end of the day, I expect to end up with a total of around 20% back in rewards, which isn’t all that different than what one might expect from a traditional hotel loyalty program.
Of course I could have booked the ~$1610 rate via Destinia instead of getting tied up with OneKeyCash, but in my case that would have meant laying out the full $1610 in cash (I couldn’t have redeemed Capital One Shopping cash for that) and having never heard of Destinia before, I’m not sure I’d have wanted to give them sixteen hundred dollars for a hotel booking. I was glad to book through a known entity, use only about $416 in cash out of pocket, and get around $250 back for a future booking.
Bottom line
When it comes to price guarantee claims, I’ve often found that persistence pays off. I don’t book paid hotel stays frequently, but when I do I often find success in price guarantee claims. However, you do need to be persistent. I had to laugh at the many robotic denial emails I got that didn’t seem to acknowledge the information I had provided. However, at the end of the day, I think that including a direct link to your search result showing exactly the same room type and policies is likely to be your best shot at getting a claim approved. And if that doesn’t work, just keep swinging for the fences — you’re bound to connect sooner or later.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Hilarious that they seem to be using Unix Time to identify their searches/transactions. Unix time is computer time, and it’s the number of seconds (in this case microseconds) since 1/1/1970. Whatever you search, if you take all but the last two digits of the unix_time number (which seem to be 63 for me always?) and stick it in a converter, you’ll get the time at which you submitted the search. And I guess they’re just storing what your search was in a database with that timestamp being the key.
Implies they only expect to get up to 1 million requests per second, but more specifically they only expect to get one request every millionth of a second *and no more*. It’s like, a high school programmer’s way to count requests because it could easily go wrong.
I definitely feel that getting a BRG has come with more frustrations more recently at Hotels.com. Good to hear a successful story!
Our Nick wins again!
Hotels.com employee here. Also implemented OneKey 🙂
I will submit your experience to dogfood.
Seems similar to what I had when I tried to match hotels.com too, lots of run arounds but they eventually matched it.
Did you only have 1 hotels.com gift card? They used to limit you to 1 per booking and the process to combine gift cards was limited (to 5 I think) and it was cumbersome.
I cannot even get five. The online reps said that they can no longer combine cards and the online merger system works for only one merge. Hotels.com has gone downhill significantly.
I had 3. I had no trouble merging three of them together using the website.
Regarding only being able to merge once, I think you can only merge *to* a card once, but then you can merge that card *to* another card, you just can’t merge some other card to that one (confusing, but you can probably figure it out).
The only gift card issue I had was that my Hotels.com account was set to Canada for some reason. That wasn’t a problem on its own – actually, it looked like I would collect 5 stamps instead of one key cash with my booking. However, I couldn’t use gift cards denominated in USD to pay in CAD, so that didn’t work.
What amazes me is the difference in price between a “breakfast included” night and a “full board” night is about 100%. “All inclusive” is nearly 3X of a basic no extras room here. They’re very proud of the food and drinks at this place!
Dear Nick,
We’re tired of responding to your emails. Here’s your OneKey cash!
Now shoo!
I burst out laughing at “…once I got invested I just couldn’t stop myself from going the distance.” I have done the same so many times; at least this exercise paid off!
This is another example of why you guys are THE BEST.
What was the total time investment in this?
In searching for a better price, filing the claim, typing the three-sentence emails to follow up, or writing this post about it for the benefit of others?
All the aspects related to filing the claim, obviously. (Articles and posts are hard to write well and take time, no doubt about that.)
I didn’t really track it. More than none, but not that much?
I mean, the emails were coming back within 7 minutes. The search consolidators did most of the heavy lifting. A screen shot takes a keyboard shortcut and typing a name of it. Maybe 30 total minutes of actual effort?
The process itself isn’t hard. The persistence required a little stick-to-it-ive-ness, but that’s no biggie. I’d say that it isn’t worth it if you’re the type of person who is going to get worked up and angry when they turn your claim down, but if you can go into it knowing that you’re taking batting practice and you can step to the plate confident that you’ll connect if you just relax and keep swinging, then I think it’s well worthwhile.
Seems like it was a good ROI.