This week’s Deal Dispatch brings you the second week of deals from the Daily Getaway 2016, including deals from Wyndham hotels, Expedia, Omni Hotels, Universal entertainment parks and Caesar Resorts and Casinos! Read my evaluation whether you should jump on any of these deals or rather save your heard-earned money for other travel opportunities.
Last week’s Deal Dispatch highlighted the Choice Hotels deal is a great opportunity and some good options with IHG as well. This weeks daily deals look as follows:
The best deal this week in my opinion is by Expedia: You receive a 35% discount on a hotel booking of $1,000. You can choose from thousands of hotels, making this especially attractive for expensive, independent hotels that might not offer discounts any other way! You also get “Gold” Status in Expedia’s rewards program – but don’t get too excited, the benefits are limited and focused mostly on their VIP hotel selection.
The biggest issue with this deal is in the fine print of the terms & conditions: You have to use the full voucher for one booking and any remaining value is lost. So, you should only use this for a booking of over $1,000 or loose some/much/all the discount you just got. If you make a high-value booking at a chain hotel, you loose out on benefits and points by booking through Expedia instead of the chain website. It works best for independent hotels and I rarely book long stays at expensive hotels to make this work for me. But if you are planning a 1-2 week holiday at a single hotel, this can be great value and I’d recommend to put an alert for April 13th!
The deals by Universal, Omni and Caesars target narrow audiences, so I’d only recommend to buy these deals if you have already planned a trip to use them and they beat the best online deal you can find for those hotels or parks. There are sometimes issues with redeeming these vouchers, so it needs to be a substantial discount over regular prices to justify the extra effort and risk!
The Wyndham Rewards deal got my immediate attention – until I read through the details. You are basically buying 15,000 points for $150 or 1 cent per point. Considering that Wyndham points are only worth 0.5-0.6 cents per point, this is not an attractive deal at all. Granted, you can get good value at some high-end properties or through their cash & points deals, but I wouldn’t recommend buying points unless you have a specific high-value booking in your mind already with availability on your dates. In general, I’d advise against purchasing points at significantly above average value, unless you have a high-saving booking lined up!
I will likely pass on this weeks deals – I don’t have any trip plans where I could take advantage of these deals and they are not nearly good enough for a speculative buy! If these deals work out for you, get ready to buy them here!
If you’d like to get more deals like this, please follow me on Twitter – I’m posting great deals daily and many will sell out quickly, so stay ahead with my Twitter updated!