HotelSlash Review
Tl;dr: The $30 annual fee may be tough to stomach, but there’s a 90-day free trial–no credit card needed–and big savings to be had.
I recently needed to book a three-day stay in the Washington, DC area, and all my usually tricks were coming up short. Use my IHG Premier to book a cheap hotel with a big points haul? Use the Capital One Travel portal with my Venture X’s 10x points on hotels? Find an affordable Airbnb? Book with points? Any way I sliced it, those three nights were going to cost me at least $450.
Enter HotelSlash. I had heard about the site from the All the Hacks podcast. It’s not my favorite pod but, credit where it’s due, one of the episodes I did listen to was an interview of the founder of HotelSlash, Jonathan Weinberg. He had previously launched AutoSlash, a rental car booking service, and the episode was about rental car hacks, and this one I do highly recommend. During the episode, they discussed the launch of HotelSlash and offered a discount code for free lifetime access (it’s in the previously link; no idea if it still works). I signed up and then forgot about it. At least until I was faced with those steep hotel prices in DC.
Thrifty Traveler wrote a great overview of HotelSlash here, so I’m not going to go deep into the details, but here are some key points. The service is normally $29.95 per year, but you can sign up to try it free for 90 days–long enough to book at least one stay, so be sure to wait until you’re in the market for a hotel booking–and you won’t need to enter your credit card info to do so, meaning you won’t roll into automatic payments.
It’s not like a traditional OTA like Expedia. Rather than seeing instant results, HotelSlash will take your desired stay information and eventually (pretty quickly in my experience) send you an email with hotel options that fit your criteria. One special aspect of HotelSlash is that they will monitor prices and send you updates if prices drop or cheaper options become available (but this only works if you book a refundable stay!).
I’ve run searches a few times, and the prices are usually great but not necessarily dramatically better than what you can find elsewhere. Once you factor in credit card and hotel rewards, it hasn’t always been worth it for me. Generally, you’ll earn credit card rewards for either the general spend or the “travel” categories, which with my Venture X and IHG Premier means about 2-3¢ back per $1 spent. Using those cards to book directly via Capital One or IHG, though, would mean closer to 10-18¢ back per dollar plus, in the case of IHG, all the “platinum” perks that come with the card.
That said, this time HotelSlash won by a mile. As I said, I couldn’t find anything under $450, but HotelSlash found me a few options, and I went with the Hilton Garden Inn. That’s a pretty nice hotel, well above my minimums, and it was located just 6 minutes from the metro so it was easy to access any part of the city. The HotelSlash price? $307. If I booked directly with Hilton, it would have been over $500. Even if I had been paying the $30 for HotelSlash’s services, it would have easily paid for itself.
Even though I knew HotelSlash was legitimate, I was still a little nervous, especially when I saw this:
But they didn’t even ask me for the voucher at the front desk, check-in went smoothly, and it was just any other normal hotel stay, only deeply discounted.
13th/top floor, too. Not bad for 40% off.
Overall, I highly recommend you give HotelSlash a try next time you’re booking, or at least the next time the prices you’re seeing make you do this:
