DealBase Discount Hotel Deals and Packages
Anyone who watches even just a modicum of television knows that travel websites are big business. Everyone saves money (or, at least, thinks they save money) when they use popular discount travel sites to find deals for their next vacation or business trip. I’m sure you’ve seen William Shatner’s career revival as front man for one of these sites.
Well, DealBase is another vacation deal finder. This one is a little different, though. It’s not a “search for it, we’ll book it, you save big” sites. Instead, it’s a sort of search engine for discount deals. Instead of booking vacations for you, they find them and report them to you instead. Just put in where you want to go and when and DealBase will pop up with a list of the best hotel stays there—current price and all.
Started by Sam Shank (formerly of TravelPost.com), David Hehman, and Howard Love, the site launched in November. Search results are listed in order of the percentage from “standard” they fall under. In other words, if the Radisson in that location normally has these rooms at $180/night and they’re listing them for $140, it’s listed as a 22% savings. Apples aren’t compared to oranges, either, so prices are compared inside hotel chains, not across the board as if a 5-star and a 3-star were the same.
When you click on a deal, the normal room rate is shown, so you can see the actual dollar figures for savings. The site doesn’t broker the specific deals, it just reports them when they happen. In other words, going directly to the Radisson’s website in the above scenario, you’d find that room for that same discount rate listed.
What DealBase really does is aggregate hotel deals across the board. So if you’re looking for a good price for an overnight in Las Vegas, you’ll likely find several options and whatever current deals are happening there.
DealBase doesn’t have all the greatest deals available, of course. So far, if you get a AAA rate or have another discount base, you probably won’t find better deals on DealBase. On the other hand, you can post those deals there since the other aspect of DealBase is it’s wiki.
While it scours databases/website automatically from many hotels, it also allows for users to put in the deals they’ve found that aren’t already on the site. This means that some of the entries you’re looking at might be from users or hotel managers wanting to let you know especially. This is a fairly unique thing to discount travel sites in my experience.
To sum up, DealBase is half database, half wiki site in which great deals (as compared to their regular priced counterparts) are shown in searchable format. The best deal might not always be there, but it’s definitely better than searching individual hotel sites for a price.
