I saved £35 on a hotel room with booking loophole that…

I saved £35 on a hotel room with booking loophole that takes seconds to check

I know that the price of seemingly everything has been on the rise in the past 12 months, but can you imagine the look on my face when the price for a hotel room I’d booked in summer had almost DOUBLED in price for the same time in 2023?

Each year, my partner and I enjoy a weekend away in Sheffield for Tramlines festival, which typically runs over three days in July. Naturally, hotel rooms are more expensive when there are events on, and they usually get booked up fast - but the prices for 2023 seemed to be a LOT more than in 2022.

This year, we paid £279 for three nights in a Premier Inn from July 22 to 25 - and when I checked for that same weekend for 2023, I considered selling the festival tickets and not bothering at all.

The room was coming up at an eye watering £548 - only £10 off being double the price. It’s safe to say that calling the hotel and trying to wangle a discount still wouldn’t have seen the weekend come up much cheaper, so I decided to look elsewhere.

That’s when I headed to Booking.com , so that I could see a number of hotels in the area and compare the prices, many of which were still coming in at over £500. Seeing as our festival tickets were £140 each, spending half a grand to stay in a hotel room just seemed obscene, entirely defeating the point of the cheap tickets.

I came across the budget hotel brand Ibis offering rooms for £295, which was a better price at least - but just as I was tapping my card details into the website, my mum told me she’d found the same room cheaper on the SAME website. The only difference? While I was surfing the web on a laptop, she was browsing on her phone .

Booking.com offers better prices for mobile browsers, and the ‘mobile-only price’ for the exact same dates and room came in at £266 on my phone - less than half of the price of Premier Inn’s room less than two miles away, and £29 cheaper than booking on my computer.

Now, thanks to the lower price, I was able to add some benefits like free cancellation and no advanced payments, which cost me a total of £317.70 for the three nights, compared to £353 if I’d booked the same perks on a desktop device - saving me over £35.

Booking.com explained: “A Mobile Rate is a special discounted rate that’s only visible when someone uses our app or accesses our website using a mobile browser.

The majority of reservations on our platform are made using mobile devices, so offering a Mobile Rate helps tap into this large group of potential guests. Mobile Rates can also help target millennials, who make up over 65 per cent of bookings on our mobile channels.”

When searching for hotels in Manchester city centre from Friday, December 30 to January, December 1, guests could save up to £49 by booking on their phone for a New Year trip.

At The Alan , desktop prices were coming in at £414, while mobile bookings would pay £387, saving £27. Meanwhile, Wilde Aparthotels slashed their prices from £487 to £438, saving almost £50 on the two-night stay. aBode visitors can save £30, with the price going from £458 to £428 on a mobile, while those staying at the Mercure Manchester Piccadilly Hotel can pay £248 down from £275.

It’s important to note that it’s not Booking.com that chooses when and how these discounts are applied, rather the individual accommodation providers, but it can save you a minimum of 10 per cent - which in my case was £35.

I’d never have thought that a hotel room would be cheaper depending on which device you book on, but it’s ridiculously easy to see if you could get a better price by checking both mobile and desktop browsers.

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