Whenever anyone asks me how long this trip is going to be, I always respond with the same two pronged answer. It’s:

“I’ll be back when I get lonely or I run out of money!”

That said, being conscientious about how much I’m spending and what I’m spending it on, which includes what types of hotels I’m staying in AND how I’m booking them.

When I traveled in South Korea solo last year, I had a great experience with backpacker hostels, so I decided to check out what the scene looked like in Cape Town for the same type of accommodations. After *hours* of combing through different sites, I came across Never@Home in Green Point.

Come on, you can’t tell me it doesn’t look AMAZING.

Once I settled on my hotel, it was time to start crunching numbers…

Never@Home has two types of rooms, single and multi-bed… and as tempted as I was to go with the $39 single rooms, I convinced myself that since this is the start of my trip, I needed to conserve $ and stay in one of the multi-bed choices. Never@Home has a “Sanctuary” women’s-only 6-bed insuite, listed on their website for $17 USD. Not bad, right?

I figured I could do better.

Hostelworld has the same room listed for:

Booking.com has it for: $15.71

Hotels.com has it for: $15.42

Ok, perfect, so even just to start, booking through a 3rd party site would immediately save me a few bucks.

But, again, I thought…. I think I can still do better.

So I started hunting for coupons.

I found that Booking.com unfortunately doesn’t really offer any coupons… but hotels.com does!

I found both a $5 off $50 and also a 5% off coupon.

Hotels.com does NOT combine coupons… and I was planning to book 7 nights.

Not a problem! I figured I’d just split the order up into a $50 and use the $5 off, and then use the 5% off for the rest.

So that should be pretty good, right? That would come out to $100.63 total for 7 nights, so $14.38 per night. That’s $2.62, or 15.4% less than the original price!

Ehhhh, I can DEFINITELY still do better.

That’s when I decided to hit my favorite cashback site, Ebates, to see if they worked with Hotels.com.

Ebates essentially is a shopping portal that allows you to get cashback for your purchases if you shop after clicking through the links on their site. I’ve been a member for over a year, and I’ve gotten over $400 in cash back from the site previously, so I know for a fact it works.

Lo and behold… Ebates works with Hotels.com for 4% cash back!

 

So of course, I booked both purchases through the portal. That’s another $4.03 back (after I stay, which is how Hotels.com and Ebates work together — obviously I could cancel my room and then I wouldn’t earn the cash back, similar to if I returned an item I purchased), putting my total at $96.60.

Done now, right?

NOPE.

One. More. Trick.

Finally, when I was paying for my rooms, I used my American Express Blue Cash card, for an additional 1% back, so another $0.97 cents will be credited to my rewards account at the end of the billing period.

That put my final room total at: $95.63 for 7 nights, and each individual night at $13.66. That’s a savings of $3.34 per night, which may not sound like a lot, but it comes out to 20%!

So essentially the method is this:

Step 1: Find the place you want to stay.

Step 2: Check out at LEAST 3-5 bulk hotel sites to find the best prices.

Step 3: Search for discount coupons for the bulk sites that have rooms where you want to stay.

Step 4: Verify if any cashback portals work with the bulk hotel sites with the best prices & coupons.

Step 5: Pick the best value…

Step 6: Use your cashback credit card to buy the hotel!

Of course for a well-priced hostel, a few dollars doesn’t seem like a lot, but over the course of an extended trip the savings will really add up and I’m hoping I’ll really be able to extend my trip by being super creative! I’ll be sure to share even more tips in the future as I figure them out!