I missed the deadline to change my booking date by less than a day. Here's what I did — mostly by accident! — to leave a day earlier without the extra hotel fee …
Mistakes happen. If the only consequence of making a mistake is that things cost a bit more than they should have, that's a pretty good outcome in the grand scheme. But it's still annoying.
Which is why finding a way to unpaint yourself from a corner is such a rush.
In this post, I'll describe how I dodged a $180 change fee that was staring me in the face. And what I did to set it up was completely by accident.
Procrastination costs
I was already late when I got around to booking my hotel for FinCon19 in DC — a conference for “money nerds.”
Even though I know that procrastination can cost money, I hadn't internalized it yet, apparently.
What prompted me to book my hotel was a tweet saying that the block of rooms in the Washington Hilton, which is the hotel that the conference was at, was filled. (Historical aside: This is the same hotel where President Reagan was shot in 1981.)
Not only that, the Marriott across the street was filled, too.
This was the second week in August, and the conference was the first week of September.
Book something … anything! …
Now that the situation had my attention, I buckled down to find what was left. DC is a crowded place and 2,500 attendees take up a lot of rooms.
With some inspired Google searching, I found the Churchill Hotel, which is also right across the street, and … they had a few rooms left!
I hit up the rebate site Lemoney because I had some Turbocredits that brought my rebate for Hotels.com up to 21% for the first $120.
I would be at the conference on Wednesday through Saturday, so I booked the hotel for four nights. The conference would be ending Saturday around midnight, so I booked the fourth night because I didn't want to carry around my suitcase all day after having checked out of the hotel in the morning. (More on this later.)
I made the reservation and opted to pay when I got there. I also remember seeing that I could cancel or change my reservation for free up through September 2nd.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I went on with my August.
A far cheaper option for Saturday
Fast forward to September 3rd, the night before the conference.
As I was discussing with my wife about when I was going to come back on Saturday, I explained to her that I booked the extra night so that I didn't have to carry all of my bags around the last day.
“Well, you know about baggage check, right?”
No, I didn't. (I'm not a regular traveler, and I'm grateful for this.)
She proceeds to look up the page on the Hilton's website that talks about their guest services and one of them is baggage check.
I called up the Hilton, and because I was attending a conference at their hotel, I could use their baggage check services … for a dollar a bag!
Well, I'll take a $1 charge over a $180 charge any day of the week! (I guess you would, too!)
A day late … and $180 short?
Upon discovering this much-cheaper alternative, I went to change my reservation to cut out the last day.
I logged in and went to change things … and found out the bad news.
I missed the deadline by less than a day. GAHHH!
My wife told me to call up the hotel to see what they could do. The employee I talked to said he'd leave a note for the manager, but typically they can work something out.
What saved this $180 hotel fee
The next day I arrived at the hotel and checked in. I asked about removing the last day from my reservation.
He told me that they could change my reservation that was booked through a third-party service like Hotels.com because I didn't pay in advance.
By postponing my payment, I had given the hotel more flexibility to help me out because they didn't have their money yet. If I had paid for my hotel when I made the reservation, I'd have been out of luck because I'd have been more at the mercy of the third party, and they had disclosed their terms clearly to me.
Bottom line: Wait to pay
I chose not to pay at the time I made the reservation because I had the option of paying later at the same price. That was a no-brainer.
It had the side benefit of letting me, in essence, bypass the deadline for the third party's change and cancellation policy.
And I reduced my expenses by $179 in the process. I exchanged a $180 night at a hotel for a $1 baggage check fee.
