Finding empty hotel rooms

A question about : Finding empty hotel rooms

I was wondering if anyone has had any success with phoning hotels on the day you would like to check-in to see if they have any empty rooms they would be willing to let out at a reduced rate

Myself, my wife and child (aged 7) would like to maybe spend this coming Sat/Sun/Mon in London and have a couple of hotels in mind that are just outside our price range. Do people these days phone and find out if rooms are free and if they are willing to let for a reduced rate or doe these things just not happen anymore due to centralized bookings/hotel policies?

Many thanks

Best answers:

• I let Trivago do the heavy lifting TBH - the surplus rooms will be discounted but they may be sold through any of the usual sales channels (not necessarily all of them). For instance on Sunday I needed to book a night in London for Tuesday. Found a hotel in a good location for me, it was listed at Ј120 for most of the sites like hotels.com, expedia, etc but thanks to Trivago I saw it listed at Ј99 with OnHotels. I went to book - but there was a problem...the price went DOWN during my booking, so I paid Ј93 for an upgraded room inc wifi and breakfast whilst the other agents still offered Ј120 for a standard room excluding breakfast.
  Maybe OnHotels's allocation of rooms was going stale so they cut their losses, maybe the other agents allocation was already gone, maybe they were not blinking first, but Trivago managed to throw up a few great oddities like this for me over the years. Much easier than ringing round where you're at best going to get a discount on the walk-up rack rate, but that's not necessarily going to be as good as an agency price anyway!
• I've done this a grand total of one time, but in the US. We'd stayed in a Nashville hotel earlier on our holiday and were returning to the city before taking a flight.
  I'd been keeping an eye on rates online for few days, then called up the morning of the day we planned to check in and asked: 'what's the best price you can do?'
  It certainly worked that time, as we got a hefty discount compared with rates available anywhere else.
  However, I don't know how that price compared to the hotel's advanced rates - we weren't able to book weeks or months ahead in that situation.
• It depends on how many rooms they have spare. If they are near capacity then on the day bookings can be the most expensive as they are basically picking up those with urgent need who dont have other choices.
  When staying at one of the top London hotels a little while ago their GM said about 2 weeks before is generally their cheapest price if they are low on bookings and price starts going back up as the price cut starts driving up the occupancy rate.
  I'd agree with others, use search engines like Kayak, Trivago and Laterooms etc. If you want then contact the hotel and see if they will match/ undercut the price or throw something in to sweeten the deal.
• HotelTonight app is good for big cities such as London.
• A lot of the time, the front desk are unable to reduce rates. However it can be a way to get an upgrade
• I haggled the thistle in newcastle down from Ј190 for two rooms to Ј65 for two rooms (twin Ј40, single Ј25).
  This was at 5pm on the day of checkin.
  I did it over the phone.
• 5pm was probably late enough that the only other chance to sell would have been if another hotel overbooked and started ringing round. At 10am they may well have turned you down ;-)
  Hotel rooms are perishables - worse than raw chicken, prawn and cream cakes! Every night, dozens or hundreds of stock has to be sold or go off and become worthless. There are always some no-shows, so some hotels will incentivise staff to sell over 100% of the rooms when they can (for instance if there's a conference in town). This sometimes backfires, with the original booker standing at the desk, and the hotel trying to find them a room for the night - and at that point front desk start phoning other hotels to get a room of similar quality. If they're in a group/collection who regularly cross-feed they may get better rates from each other, but many times they'll pay rack rate for an empty room just to solve the problem they created. If there's a conference in town, your hotel has capacity and you know the others are overbooked, you're not letting a room go for pennies when you can charge rack for it if you hopefully get an overbooker ringing round at 11pm desperate to unload a guest ;-)