discover [hotel tonight]

No posts yet this week? For shame! Instead of blogging, I decided to spend yesterday evening doing hours (and hours...I self-identified as a maximizer over a year ago) doing research for a last minute weekend escape. And why am I able to embark on an unplanned, spontaneous vacation while staying within my budget?

Hotel Tonight.

I'm not sure who shared this with me, but considering how much I travel, my helpful friends are often sending me hotel or flight related hacks. And this is one of the best. 

Hotel Tonight allows you to book hotels for the current evening, or up to 7 days out, at discounted rates. Pretty standard, right? I guess, but they do it the BEST. The app is incredibly user friendly and functional: they sort the hotels and label them with one of a handful of descriptors from Basic (clean but no frills) to Charming (B&B's! old homes!) to Luxe (hubba hubba), and you can book in just 3 clicks. Ultimately I care about price,and these are the rock-bottom lowest you're going to find.

The best deals (I've done a LOT of monitoring, but this is just anecdotal) are always available for same-day reservations. Which makes sense- when it's 6pm, I'm sure hotels assume those rooms are going unused, and they're willing to fill them at low rates. I was stranded in Chicago last month and found 5-star hotels offering $139 rooms...at 10pm at night. Talk about late check-in. D and I decided that Asheville is too good of a getaway to leave to chance, so we decided to book a few days out- which gives me time to pick which breweries and pubs we'll be visiting in "Beer City USA" (definitely this one, and this one). 

It's funny, one of their taglines is "plan less, live more". That is SO not me- if I don't plan it, is it even worth living?!- but Hotel Tonight actually encourages me to pull the trigger and get out the door because I'm confident they truly are the best system with the lowest prices out there.

So check it out! My invite code is MGIBBONS34 to get $25 off your first booking (and the same for me, too).