Round The World Tickets
Finding luxury for a low price on Saturday nights
This is a really interesting trick that I’ve used many times while traveling, and even though I’ve been aware of it for a long time, I usually pull this off by accident. The short version is that if you are looking for a place to sleep in a city, and you are only staying over a Saturday night, you can sometimes get insane deals that you can’t get any other day of the week.
Why Saturday night only?
The key to this trick is to be in a city with many business travelers, and then be sure your accommodation search includes 3-star and above properties. You can sometimes get luxurious rooms at nice business hotels for about what you’d pay for a private room at a hostel nearby. If you are going from hostel dorm to hostel dorm, then this is a really worthwhile thing to try in order to get a bit of big-city luxury mixed in between those dorm beds.
As you probably know, the vast majority of business travel takes place for weekday meetings and so forth. Many business hotels are jammed on Sunday nights with people who’ve arrived the night before a Monday meeting, and some of them are still fairly full on Friday nights of travelers whose schedule didn’t allow them to get out before Saturday morning. But obviously Saturday night is the total dead-zone, and even in cities with good nightlife and weekend visitors, you can sometimes find these deals for Saturday nights only.
My great recent example
I just got back from a 5-week research trip that took me through 9 countries in Europe. I stayed mostly in private rooms in hostels, and they averaged about €60 per night. The hostel in Dublin that I had stayed in a few days earlier was fully booked, so I went to kayak.com to see what else was available, not really thinking I’d be able to afford anything nice at all.
One of the cheapest listings for Dublin that night also said it was a 4-star self-catering hotel. It was €55 for that night, so I was more than a little suspicious, but it turned out to be a hotel that usually is full of business travelers who stay all week, and on Saturday nights their rooms are empty unless they can find some bargain hunters like me to fill them.
It turned out the location was a bit farther out than the map led me to believe, but it was still only about 4 short blocks past St. Stephen’s Green, so it was quite central. When I was shown my room I almost fainted. This was basically a large studio apartment with a small kitchen, a sofa, and a flat-screen TV. It was easily one of the nicest rooms I’ve ever paid for myself, and it was so nice that I got in early that evening so I could cook myself a pasta dinner and sip wine in my spacious living room. The tiny room at the hostel was €60 and sold out, and that was one of the luckiest things to happen to me in ages.
(The photo on top of this page is just of the living room part of the room, but there was also a small kitchen and an elevated sleeping area with a huge bed.)
Finding these specials
You can search kayak.com or ratestogo.com, as well as many other sites, and if they are available they’ll be mixed right in among the budget places. If you are searching for a Saturday night only, then pay attention to location (to make sure you are not out by the airport), but don’t be surprised if you find a really nice room for next to nothing.
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