Got a Tesco credit card? Jump on a GREAT Hotels.com promotion

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• Andy says:

  12 Jul12 July 09:03

  I have a Tescobank debit card – I presume there’s no chance of that working is there? (I knows everything specifically mentions Tesco Credit Card – but it is worth asking!)

  • Rob says:

    12 Jul12 July 09:45

    No point in asking, you may want to try it anyway. However I expect that Hotels.com recognises Tesco credit cards by the BIN (the first six digits of the card number) which would instantly reject your debit card.

• Mouse says:

  12 Jul12 July 09:09

  Damn, closed my Tesco card a few weeks ago after deciding it was useless having barely used it since the massive reduction in earning a a few years ago. Would this be open to new cardholders too?

• Mikeact says:

  12 Jul12 July 09:13

  Assuming….10 nights booking @ £3 per night = £30 credit towards your next Hotels.com booking. Not particularly good, but I accept 18750 Virgin points is not too bad a return if you’re not bothered about a one night discount somewhere.

  • Joints&Piles says:

    12 Jul12 July 09:38

    £3. And what difference does it make? It’s a 10% rebate on what you spend, whether that’s £3 or £3000.

    • Mikeact says:

      12 Jul12 July 09:41

      Sorry, I obviously meant a £3 credit towards your next stay.

    • marcw says:

      12 Jul12 July 09:58

      It’s not a 10%. 11 nights, you get 1 free. That’s not a 10%.

      • Mikeact says:

        12 Jul12 July 10:11

        Interested…how do you work that out…each time we hit ten nights, we start again towards the next ten.

        • Rob says:

          12 Jul12 July 10:14

          Technically ….

          You are staying 11 nights @ £100, so you have paid £1000 for £1100 of rooms as the last one was free. The saving is therefore 100/1100 or a 0.91% rebate.

          More important is that the 10% rebate is post tax. This is less important now when VAT on hotels is cut to 5% but when it is 20%, a £100 hotel room is £83 + VAT and so your Hotels.com Rewards credit is only £8.33.

      • Joints&Piles says:

        12 Jul12 July 10:33

        Regardless, the rebate you get isn’t somehow better because you had more expensive bookings. Several comments in the past on HfP along the lines of “I don’t want to make a cheap booking because the reward night value will be low” (or see above). The rebate is a fixed proportion of what you spend.

      • Joints&Piles says:

        12 Jul12 July 10:41

        Alright then, let me put it this way. The value of the reward night is 10% of the total cost of your 10 nights. After tax. Whether you spend £30 on 10 nights or £30,000 on 10 nights. And since you can use that amount as part-payment, you are not losing anything by having a cheap booking.

        • Doug M says:

          12 Jul12 July 11:29

          No, it’s slightly more complex. When you use the free night you miss out on that value of credit to your next free night. So if you use a £100 free night on a £200 night, you’ve effectively missed out on earning on £100 of stay. Regardless of whether you think it’s 10% or 9%, using the free nights correctly (voucher as close as possible to stay cost) is very important part of the strategy.

        • chabuddy geezy says:

          12 Jul12 July 14:57

          Another issue with redeeming reward nights is that you are not always eligible for sales pricing, so it could work out cheaper and be more flexible to skip reward nights and just use the frequent 8% discount codes instead.

        • Joints&Piles says:

          12 Jul12 July 15:07

          I’m sure hotels.com would also say it makes sense to spend £1000 more over ten nights to make sure you don’t miss an opportunity cost of (less than) £10 of reward credit on that £200 stay.

          Yes, whatever your voucher is worth you may as well try to use it on a booking close to that price, but it doesn’t matter how you spin it, you do not win anything by spending more to get a higher value voucher and the supposed opportunity cost of the cash portion paid when redeeming is (roughly, ignoring tax etc) 0.01 of the extra spend over 10 nights

• Neil Spellings says:

  12 Jul12 July 09:26

  For those who are members of the hotels.com rewards scheme, probably best to NOT login to your account when making low cost hostel bookings given your free night award is the average value of your last ten bookings and you probably want more than a £2-3 hotel as a reward night!

  • Tracey says:

    12 Jul12 July 09:33

    On the other hand if you are currently sitting on 8 reward nights averaging far to much for any planned trips, this is an ideal way to bring the average down and reach 10 nights.

  • Joints&Piles says:

    12 Jul12 July 09:34

    The “free night” is an amount that can be used as part-payment towards any stay.

    • Rob says:

      12 Jul12 July 09:42

      You also may actively WANT to do a £3 night. For example, I often find that my free night awards are coming in a bit high because the rooms I am most likely to book via Hotels.com are suites for the family at independent hotels. I don’t want a free night worth £500 because it is hard to use. I would rather bung some £3 hostels onto my account and pull down the average, as well as triggering the free night earlier.

      • Mikeact says:

        12 Jul12 July 09:54

        I doubt, but I don’t know of course, that many Hotel.com customers are racking up nights equal to a £500 future stay discount.

        • Neil Spellings says:

          12 Jul12 July 10:01

          Indeed, but we all know Rob is “special” 😉

        • Rob says:

          12 Jul12 July 10:05

          What do you consider a typical price for a room that can sleep four (in beds, not rollaways) in a five star hotel in a holiday resort in the middle of Summer?

        • Rob says:

          12 Jul12 July 10:04

          The point is the same regardless. If your ‘usual’ stay is £75 but a couple of pricey ones have your next voucher dropping out at nearer £125, you may still want to push a couple of £3 nights through the account.

      • Doug M says:

        12 Jul12 July 11:35

        Rob, I don’t think that makes sense. If you stayed 8 nights at £500 why wouldn’t you be able to use a £500 free night? Artificially reducing the average makes no sense to me. It’s simply about using the free night value to match cost as closely as possibly.
        In truth it’s neither 9% or 10% as a discount unless you can perfectly match free nights to stay cost. In an extreme example using £50 free night on a £500 room is throwing away £450 worth of earning potential.

        • Rob says:

          12 Jul12 July 11:44

          Also true. My logic is that I use free nights for personal stays when I am on my own, because these are more likely to be just one night. These will be lower value stays because I don’t need a suite.

          Higher value family stays are multi-night and so mixing in vouchers gets more complex for the reasons you state above. We also often take multiple rooms which, again, adds complexity if you want to use the voucher for just one room on one night.

          It is even more complex for me because:
          a) anything HfP related is a tax write off and so it is always better using cash
          b) I have high level status with Hilton, IHG and Marriott and would be surrendering status benefits on top of losing points

    • Mikeact says:

      12 Jul12 July 09:49

      We’re off to Cornwall next week, using two of our ‘free night’ award discounts…..one was worth £149 and the other £152, which has made a significant dent for a couple of the nights at a pricey, privately owned, non chain, hotel .

      • Mikeact says:

        12 Jul12 July 10:32

        I guess I must be wrong then…..many people booking £5000+ for 10 nights to get a £500 credit. But how many of these fortunate higher spenders would need/want to go through Hotels.com ? Not too many I would suspect.

        • Rob says:

          12 Jul12 July 11:27

          You seem to have this view, Mike, that wealthy people bathe in champagne every night and walk down the streets showering £20 notes on random people.

          The vast majority of wealthy people I know worked exceptionally hard for their money and if they can get a £100 rebate on a £1000 hotel room they will take it. I can promise you that 90% of people who made their money by running their own business will do this, because it is hard baked in the mentality of anyone who has ever started a company from nothing.

        • Tracey says:

          12 Jul12 July 22:35

          We’ve had a few holidays where hotels.com proved the best value. One was a sandals resort booked at short notice. Rather than end up with a voucher of too high a value, we bought a couple of nights in a cheap hostel somewhere to ensure that the expensive nights were spread across 2 reward nights.

        • Rob says:

          12 Jul12 July 22:42

          Hotels.com is unlikely to be pricier than booking direct and, for logged in users, can often be cheaper. Plus 9% in Rewards.

          We just booked €1400 of rooms in Porto. Even with Virtuoso benefits, Emyr only beat Hotels.com deal because of my commission share. Our Atlantic Hotel stay in Jersey last year went via Hotels.com which beat direct booking, SLH, Hyatt and, even factoring in commission split, Emyr.

          A normal hotel may well give you a crap room by not booking direct. If you are booking specific suites, they can’t do that.

      • Genghis says:

        12 Jul12 July 11:04

        Whereas if you’ve got your £150 voucher and you plan on using if for a night of say £400, I view that as a waste since you don’t get anything back for the additional £250 spend. It’s best to match up night values with almost what you need to spend pre tax.

        • Doug M says:

          12 Jul12 July 11:37

          Exactly. How you use the vouchers is key to getting value. All the arguments about 9% or 10% are missing the point about voucher usage being the key to the real discount achieved.

        • The Savage Squirrel says:

          12 Jul12 July 13:47

          Indeed. The most useful voucher matches your would-have-spent-it-anyway-if-paying-cash booking pattern. I have a considerably higher than normal voucher thanks to an all-inclusive resort holiday for 4 people in August. Two vouchers at half that value each would have been more valuable to me despite being the same face value as my single voucher.

        • Mikeact says:

          12 Jul12 July 17:28

          Not sure where I implied wealthy persons have champagne every night or are throwing £20 notes around, unless I missed them. Likewise I would expect them to work hard, like yours truly, but I’m still not convinced that the wealthy….whatever that means…use Hotel.com on a regular basis. More likely top tier members of the major chains, or the other up market associations,
          where many high end properties are not available on regular booking sites. Or of course rental properties, villas etc.

• WillPS says:

  12 Jul12 July 10:00

  “Sorry, we’re having some trouble at the moment. Please try again.
  There are some problems with the form that need to be corrected. Please check the highlighted fields.”

  Anyone having this problem? Only field I’m being asked to re-enter is the CVV (which I do each time and get the same).

  • @mkcol says:

    12 Jul12 July 11:46

    Did you autofill your card details?
    If so try doing it all manually.

  • WillPS says:

    12 Jul12 July 11:47

    Managed to get it working by using a date a few days further in the future.

• Chris says:

  12 Jul12 July 10:34

  Oh gosh, I’m 2 hrs from home where my Tesco card is – can I make it back in time before this goose is dead?!!

• Mouse says:

  12 Jul12 July 11:09

  Any views on if they change the T&Cs to have (for example) a minimum qualifying spend per booking, what would happen to bookings made before the T&Cs change? Would they honour the original terms? (Given that one of the T&Cs is that they can change the T&Cs in any way at any time, I think they would be within their rights not to honour the original offer.) And then second question leading on from that – is it better to book stays in the coming days in the hope that they go through before any change to the T&Cs or is it better to book stays way in the future so that there is a chance to cancel and get a refund if the T&Cs do change?

  • Christophe says:

    12 Jul12 July 11:12

    Surely T&Cs at the time of booking apply? And if not I’d expect a refund.

    • Mouse says:

      12 Jul12 July 11:22

      Only the T&Cs on the Tesco offer would have changed though, not the T&Cs on the hotel booking. The conditions say “Tesco Bank and Hotels.com reserve the right to withdraw the promotion or amend these Terms and Conditions without prior notice at any time, for whatever reason, and without any liability to customers for doing so”. I don’t know to what extent that is compatible with the Consumer Rights Act but if anyone was obviously gaming the promotion I think they would find it very hard to get any money back.

• MKB says:

  12 Jul12 July 11:52

  If Tesco decide they don’t want to pay out on low-cost bookings, their get-out will be to argue that the “stay completed” requirement is not met if you don’t show up.

  I’ve tried a cheap booking for tonight but obviously won’t know for several weeks whether the points get credited.

  Probably worth a punt to book a few more.

  • Rob says:

    12 Jul12 July 11:57

    Hotels.com doesn’t know if the stay completes.

    • WillPS says:

      12 Jul12 July 12:01

      Hotels.com aren’t asking for your Clubcard details, so it must be Tesco Bank who will do the payout based on Hotels.com spend – how would Tesco Bank know if the individual stays completed or not?

      Presumably there could be some way they could check but knowing Tesco Bank do we really think this will be what is happening?

      • Rob says:

        12 Jul12 July 12:07

        Your Tesco credit card number IS a Clubcard number.

        • WillPS says:

          12 Jul12 July 12:16

          So you reckon Hotels.com will tell Tesco Bank who to pay based on PAN? That seems at odds with the T&C which tells you to talk to Tesco Bank if you haven’t had your reward after 14 weeks, rather than them.

    • Sam G says:

      12 Jul12 July 16:36

      hotels.com should know – I used to run tech for a hotel group and our system interface would automatically feed back no show to the OTAs so our commission was charged correctly & guests informed. We’d then charge the no show fee (1 night or full stay depending on the rate) or collect during month end billing depending on the arrangements

      Agree that smaller hostel types etc may not do this correctly but if they do they’ll still get their money for a 1 night stay anyway assuming they’ve set some form of cancellation policy, so they’ve no reason not to

    • Mikeact says:

      12 Jul12 July 17:43

      Indirectly maybe they do. From a hotel booked via Hotels.com that I was looking to cancel.
      “As you have booked through Hotels.com they take payment on booking, and then we take payment on your departure from them. Unfortunately, as the booking was cancelled, we have not received any funds from Hotels.com at all.”
      So, if you pre paid say £250 and miss the cancellation deadline Hotels.com keep the lot the hotel gets nothing….or so this hotel implied.

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