Why Price Match and Free Cancellation are important

Tokyo, Japan

Here's a great example on why Price Match and Free Cancellation are important when booking a hotel. We recently booked a hotel costing a little over 800 EUR for an upcoming trip. We are quite loyal customers of Hotels.com because of the great loyalty program they have but sometimes are forced to book from other sources. This time Hotels.com didn't have this specific hotel and due to certain circumstances we had to go to this exact hotel, so we ended up using Booking.com. 

Luckily Booking also had the Price Match and Free Cancellation policy on this hotel.

As per my usual habits, I was checking the price of this hotel regularly even though it was sold out long ago. I do this for our hotel bookings almost daily, to make sure we are getting the best price. Once it becomes a habit, it only takes two minutes a day. 
Two weeks before the trip, KABOOM, there it was, the same hotel with exactly the same room for almost half of the original price. To top that, this room was now also available on Hotels.com.

Pool are of our hotel in Sanur, Bali, Indonesia

So I booked the room on Hotels.com.

Cancelled my booking at Booking.com.

Sent the Price Match request I found from another source which was later approved.

We got the room for about 480 EUR.

The next day, the hotel was sold out again. Had I not consistently checked the price almost every day, we would have lost the discount.

With the money saved on this stay, we got to book flights to Munich for the both of us. Not only did we save actual cash on the hotel stay, we also got to collect 7 reward nights on Hotels.com which often equals to additional saving of 10%. It means that for every 10 nights you collect, you get one for free (for the value of an average price of those 10 nights). This might seem like a little but last year we collected roughly 50 nights in a hotel. Calculating all together, we save about 750 EUR every year only by preferring one hotel booking website.
To top that, annually we also save over 1000 EUR on matching prices we find on other hotel booking sites. Normally the savings are small, some tens of euros per hotel booking. But sometimes it's more, even hundreds of euros. 

Another great example is our hotel in Munich. By searching for a lower price after booking I managed to save 40 EUR, which basically means a day of free car rental!