How we decide something is a deal
Most travel sites tell you a room is 58% off. Off what? Usually a rack rate the hotel invented so the discount looks big. We do it differently: we check the same room, the same way, every night, and we only call it a deal when today’s price is well below what that room actually costs.
What we check
A fixed set of rooms in 12 cities — 540 properties in total. For each one we ask the same standardised question: one night and seven nights, for two adults, refundable and non-refundable, at fixed distances ahead of the stay. A property has no single price, so we never pretend it does; we track each of those questions separately.
How often we check it
Every night. Each night’s answer is stored and never edited — if we get something wrong we add a correction rather than rewriting history, so the chart you see is the record we actually collected.
Once a week we also ask what the same room costs on dates spread across the coming year. That is what lets us say when a city is cheap, rather than only what it costs today.
What counts as a deal
Two comparisons, and a price has to pass both once we know enough. First, against comparable rooms in the same city on the same night — that catches a hotel that is simply cheap for its class. Second, against that exact room’s own recent prices — that catches a hotel that is cheap today relative to itself.
Requiring both is what filters out seasons. A room in a Mediterranean city in October looks like a bargain against its summer prices; comparing it with its neighbours on the same night shows it is simply October.
There is also a floor in absolute terms. A large percentage off a cheap room is not worth anyone’s attention.
What we don’t do
We do not predict prices. We can tell you what a room has cost and how much it swings; we cannot tell you what it will do next, and saying otherwise in public would be a guess wearing a number’s clothing.
We do not compare a refundable rate with a non-refundable one, or a room with breakfast against one without. Those are different products at different prices, and treating them as the same room is how a fake discount gets made.
We track 540 properties in 12 cities. If your hotel isn’t one of them, we have nothing useful to tell you about it.
How we make money
We earn a commission when you book through our links. It doesn’t change your price, and it doesn’t affect what we publish — the threshold is a number, not a judgement call.