Booking a day use room at a hotel can sometimes be a little tricky. There are a few online travel agencies that specialise in it but whenever I’ve checked them out when I’ve needed a room for just a day, I’ve not found them to have very compelling rates. I’ve also found that most hotel chains’ websites don’t have a function to price up day use for rooms. While I’m sure many hotels, particularly ones located at airports, have rates and will happily sell you a room for a few hours, it generally seems you need to email or call the property directly.
Day Use Rates At Hilton Hotels
The one big exception to this is Hilton. Direct on their website, they offer day use rates at just about all of their hotels. I’ve taken advantage of this function on the Hilton website several times when I’ve had a full day between flights and currently have one booked for the Conrad in Bangkok. The prices are usually totally reasonable and on top of that, thanks to my Diamond status with HHonors, I get lounge access regardless of the room booked which makes it even better value.
I would probably only expect city hotels to publish day use rates as I figured they would mostly be used during a transit between flights. Before writing this though, I decided to have a play around on Hilton’s website and day use rates are available at a surprisingly impressive variety of their properties. The only hotel I actually found that doesn’t offer them was the Conrad in Bora Bora. Even the Conrad in the Maldives offers day use rates! I can’t imagine when that would ever come in handy for anyone but I guess it’s nice to have the option?
Booking A Room For Day Use Only On Hilton’s Website
Booking a room for day use on the Hilton website is really straight forward. You just enter the destination and pick your check-in date. Once you do this the website will automatically choose the following day for your check-out and you just need to amend this to be the same day as your check-in and search. Easy peasy.
I can imagine that for properties that operate at close to capacity on a regular basis that this might introduce some operational challenges but I still find it a little odd that none of the other chains offer these rates online even at airport hotels.
Hilton have a number of handy properties at airports around the world such as in Beijing and Frankfurt and these become even better options for long transits in these cities due to how easy it is to book them. If I had an 8 hour transit in London Heathrow and want to book a day use in the Sofitel at Terminal 5 for example, I can’t book it online. I’m sure they would be able to offer me a rate if I email or call them, and obviously that’s not the end of the world, but it’s a lot more effort than just checking on their website. If I have an 8 hour transit in Frankfurt and want to book a room at the Hilton I can just go to hilton.com and pick a room.
Hilton City Hotels
If you have a transit long enough that getting into the city and back to the airport isn’t a problem it gets even better. As I mentioned, I have a full day transit in Bangkok coming up and when I checked out the Hilton website for rooms I had three properties to pick from, the Conrad, the Hilton Millennium by the river and the Hilton Sukhumvit and each of these had multiple room categories to choose from. Not only that but lead in rooms at any of these hotels were available for less than AU$100. When you factor in lounge access, that’s a pretty great deal.
Hilton Beach And Island Resorts
Where it gets really interesting is beach and island destinations. For example, take the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island. If I search the Hilton website for the 20th of June to the 20th of June 2017 for day use rates, rooms are available for as little as US$280 plus taxes all the way up to US$2300 for the day in a Family Suite.
As I said, I’m all for having as many options available as possible but realistically who is that for? Getting to the Conrad Rangali is not exactly Uber-able. Possibly for guests staying at close by resorts, so they can come and spend a day at the Conrad?
Fantastic Either Way…
Anyway, it’s really fantastic being able to book rooms at just about any Hilton property word wide for day use. It’s even better being able to just jump on their website and compare properties and room types and it generally represents much better value than booking through the online travel agencies that specialise in day use rooms.
I wonder what are check in and check out times for day use rates?
Usually it’s 9am to 5pm but does vary a little from hotel to hotel. The times are generally clearly displayed when booking. The Conrad in the Maldives doesn’t show that information at any stage in the booking process though, so I have no idea. I imagine it probably doesn’t come up all that often.