New Hotel Booking Site Stayful Has Us Hopeful (So Long As Our Bid Gets Accepted)

July 22, 2013 at 5:29 PM | by juliana | Comment (1)

UPDATE 7.23.11: The recommend bid of $190 for The Nolitan Hotel was denied. Back to square one we guess.

Being hotel nerds determined to get the best deal on our hotel rooms, we've been known to get a little obsessive with all the hotel booking sites out there. We once rounded up our 5 favoritebooking sites to use and we're not lying when we say we usually consult all of those sites before booking a hotel room. And now we'll be adding one more into the mix--Stayful.com.

Stayful.com was just announced last week as a new booking site for independent boutique hotels, and not for every random chain hotel brand under the sun as you often see on most booking sites. But Stayful is not as wide-open as other booking sites. For starters, the site is in beta right now and is invite-only. And it's also only offering hotels in San Francisco and New York. So if you were looking to book that Chicago getaway, you'll just have to sit tight.

But Stayful does have one cool feature that most other sites don't usually have--"Bid or Book It Now." As the name suggests, you can search hotel rooms and either bid a lower price than what's listed or book it now and get the best available rate. If you're unsure about what to bid (and perhaps to prevent people from bidding too low), Stayful gives guests "recommended bids" which are rates that their site's algorithm believes the hotel is most likely to accept. Aha, finally some guidance in the hotel room bidding realm. That said, you can enter your own bid but you can only enter one bid per hotel every 24 hours.

According to Stayful folks, the independent boutique hotel industry loses $13.9 billion in revenue each year due to unsold hotel rooms. Cheryl Rosen, co-founder and CEO of Stayful, who previously worked at Expedia, Hotels.com called the Bid or Book It Now function of Stayful the "missing piece" in the online travel world

“There are thousands of independent boutique hotels around the world and they’ve struggled to find new customers for their unsold inventory. On the other side, travelers often don’t realize that they aren’t getting the best prices through existing sites. With Stayful, they’ll choose their own unique hotel experience and choose exactly the price they want to pay.”

So how do the rates and suggested bids stack up against the competition? We plugged in dates for August 1-3 on Stayful for New York and the following came up:

The site is true to its mission to feature independent boutique hotels, with the exception being the Trump Hotel at Central Park. But the "recommended bid" prices were about $50 less than the instant reservations prices. That's pretty good. We especially liked The Nolitan for a recommended bid of $190 versus the Book It Now price of $249 for a Neighborhood Queen Balcony.

So we clicked on the Recommended Bid button to see what would happen. Almost instantaneously, we received an email from Stayful telling us that the bid was sent to the hotel for review. After 24 hours, we would receive a note telling us whether the hotel accepts it. From then, we have three hours to make the decision if we want to book the hotel or not. Here's the email wording:

Please allow at least 24 hours for a response directly from Stayful. Our partner hotels typically respond very quickly because we're helping them sell rooms that may have gone unoccupied, which is why our members are able to get excellent rates.

Meanwhile, over at Expedia, The Nolitan was going for $245 a night for the same room type. The Nolitan's own website was offering $292 for a fully pre-paid rate for the same room type. If our Stayful bid gets accepted, then we will have saved nearly $100 off the hotel's room rate. Score!

If you're in a hurry and need a room fast, clearly, this site is not for you. But if you like the idea of bidding or negotiating for your room and can't stand the opaque-ness of other sites (like Priceline and Hotwire), not to mention the hassle (raise your hand if you're bid has been denied a few times on Priceline) then Stayful is going to make you gleeful. And hopefully, lead to a gleeful hotel stay as well.

via HotelChatter - http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2013/7/22/165353/258