Although Fuerteventura is fortunately not a mass-tourism destination, there are excellent hotels here that attract their audience, too. Besides, the hack I’m describing below works in hotels worldwide, so you might find it helpful whenever you travel and wish to pay less for more.
You’re all familiar with Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, and probably some other booking engines. Maybe a bit less widely known is Hot Wire by Expedia, which usually offers great deals on specific, selected hotel rooms. The idea behind is simple – if the hotel expects to have a couple of rooms unsold at a particular date, it makes more sense to sell them for a bit lower price than leaving them empty. However, for some reason, the system only works for bigger hotels with more rooms. That’s why it’s unlikely to find smaller private accommodations there that would typically be listed on (for example) Airbnb.
Two more things before we begin: this method only works when you’re flexible regarding the hotel. If you wish to stay at a particular one, you might be lucky and find it on the discounted list, but you also might not. The second thing I wish to share is a disclaimer that this is not a paid promotion.
Now let’s see how it works.
First, we’ll select the place and the date, as we usually do. I’ve chosen Fuerteventura, April 16th -23th, 2022.
The list of hotels pops up. Pay attention to the first one, two, three (the number of “deals” depends on the destination, the date, etc.; in this case, we have one). As we can see, the hotel is in Caleta de Fuste area, it’s a 3-star hotel, and the price is discounted from 81 euro per night to 47 euro per night, which is quite a deal.
Now let’s see the name of the hotel we’re checking – and ups!! There’s no hotel name there, and that’s the hack behind the offer. The reason for the secrecy lies in the fact that there are guests who booked through other channels and are paying the full price for the same hotel room on these exact dates, and they would probably feel uncomfortable knowing they overpaid for maybe even 50%.
So, we’re booking a hotel without knowing which one exactly we’re getting – although a system gives us a clue. Check the “What hotel will I get?” in the below right corner!
Clicking there opens a new window with, in this case, three hotels: Suite Hotel Castillo de Elba, Aparthotel Broncemar Beach, and Blue Sea Hotel Caleta Dorada. We’ll get to stay in one of these three hotels.
If we’re happy with staying in either one of the three hotels, we can make a booking for the discounted price.
But – we can also dig a bit deeper and try to find exactly which of these three hotels is ours.
For that, we’ll scroll a bit further down until we get to reviews. We already know all three hotels have at least a 3,0+ rating, but it’s quite unlikely all three will have exactly the same score for Hotel condition, Quality of service, Room comfort, and Room cleanliness.
Since Hot Wire is Expedia’s booking platform, we can check the reviews for all three hotels on the Expedia website and try to figure out which one has the most similar scores. It’s very likely no one will match exactly, but I’m sure you’ll be able to make a pretty good guess.
We still have one more tool to explore – the Hot Wires’s “Hot Tip” we can find at the bottom of the Points of interest page: “While we can’t tell you the hotel’s location until after booking, we can tell you exactly how far it is from these points of interest.”
If you’re in the mood for some Sherlock Holming, open Google Earth and put in the distances.
This is how you can find a nice hotel for a good price all around the world! Happy traveling!
