AutoSlash

Some of you may have used AutoSlash in the past to get a great deal on a car rental. More recently, we launched a sister-site called HotelSlash to help folks get great deals on hotels as well.

Similar to AutoSlash, one of the defining features of HotelSlash is that reservations made through the site will automatically be tracked for lower rates. Not only will you be able to get a great below-market rate up-front, but you'll also be able to rest easy knowing that we'll email you if a better deal comes along as your check-in date approaches. Just like with AutoSlash, we want to take the work out of getting the best deal possible.

To be clear, we'll be offering rates not available to the general public. Depending on the property and dates, pricing will range from very good to fantastic. Because these are non-public rates, you'll go through a very quick initial signup process when requesting a quote.

We're not quite ready to launch to the general public just yet, but we're making the site available via our "Early Acess" program to the Flyertalk community. At some point, we may charge a membership fee, but anyone who signs up in the next 30 days by using the early access code of FTEARLY, or by clicking here, will be grandfathered in and will never be charged a membership fee to get our best rates.

A few things to keep in mind:
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• You need to have a hotel in mind when requesting a quote. Searching by city, address, point-of-interest, etc. is coming but we're not quite there yet, hence the "early access" designation.
• Most of our deals are prepaid, but we also offer some pay-at-hotel deals. As long as you choose a refundable rate, your reservation will be tracked automatically for price drops.
• Loyalty benefits and earning hotel points are not guaranteed, but we find that in many cases, hotels will be willing to add your member number at check-in and you'll be able to earn points on your stay.

Feedback is always welcomed!

kevflyer

This is great! Would like to see a way to track a booking by simply entering the trip info & price instead of forwarding the confirmation email though
I see that rates can be displayed in other currencies, but would it be possible to also pay in hotel's local currency?

El_Duderito

Can you store the selected date and number of travelers to make subsequent queries in the same city easier? Thanks.

AutoSlash

Thanks for the suggestion. This is theoretically possible, but it's very challenging when you deal with things like taxes and/or resort fees that may or may not be included, different room and bed types, etc. We agonized over this during the initial phase of development but we eventually determined that for the majority of our users (i.e. non-Flyertalk folks) this would present a challenge and it would likely be garbage in / garbage out. That's why we opted to have folks forward their confirmation emails.

Is there a specific reason that you feel that forwarding your hotel confirmation email is less preferable to having to enter all your reservation details into a form?

Keep in mind that if you just want to check rates with us on a one-time basis as opposed to ongoing tracking, you can do exactly that by requesting a quote.

As for paying in a hotel's currency, if you make a non-prepaid reservation with us then you'll pay at the hotel in the local currency. As far as our prepaid deals, were only supporting USD at the moment but we may add additional currencies down the road. Can you help us to understand why you would want to pay in the hotel's local currency if it was a prepaid reservation?

AutoSlash

Yes, once you enter a quote, you have the option to keep all the same information and then you can edit anything you like to submit additional requests:



Additionally, once you view your quote, we'll soon be adding an edit function so you can change anything about your request. That functionality should be rolling out in the coming weeks so stay tuned!

kevflyer

I think some privacy-minded folks may not want to share too much information about their reservations. Those email usually contain confirmation number and personal details, so anyone can usually modify or cancel a reservation with such information on hand.


From a couple rate requests I made, I can see the almost all the rates are prepaid, but maybe that's just the hotels I was looking at.
It makes it easier for those outside the US with a CC that charges foreign exchange fee, and also if the reservation has to be cancelled, they can get the refunds without subject to exchange rate fluctuation.

AutoSlash

You are welcome to strip out any personal identification before forwarding. The important stuff for us is:
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• Property name/location
• Room class/type
• Number of beds and type
• Number of adults and children in the room
• Full pricing section
• Full cancellation policy

As long as we have the above, we're good.

Most of our rates are prepaid right now. That's generally where we can discount most heavily. In the future, we expect to have more booking/payment options. It's still early days for us.

Understood. We're focusing on US and Canadian customers primarily right now, but we hope to be able to support more currencies in the future.

We appreciate all the feedback. It's definitely helpful!

aquanine

Feedback: I like that the cancellation policy is very upfront, and that it identifies when rates must be prepaid. The autofill takes awhile. The rate was good - about the same as a Priceline "limited time offer" but HotelSlash was free cancellation while Priceline was not. It would be nice to know if I needed to use a card with no foreign transaction fees or not for this foreign hotel. My first card got rejected for some reason, so I had to use a second card. As far as I can tell, there is no way to sign up without going through the request flow which was a bit confusing because I wanted to apply the FTEARLY access code. And when signing up through the FTEARLY access code I saw the message thanking me for being a Flyertalker, but since I wanted a 2 bed, I edited preferences to be for multiple beds, but when that returned to the request quote screen I saw the message thanking me for being a Flyertalker had disappeared and that FTEARLY had disappeared from the web url. Hopefully the code remains applied to my account, since I don't believe there is a way to check.

jmsnyc

Can we register for the site if we do not have a hotel to track at the moment? I only see a way to search or sign in, as opposed to sign up

kevflyer

Got it! Yeah. Hopefully not too difficult for people to remove the sensitive info. I know HTML tables don't play well sometimes.
Curious if you have a team of people doing data entry from the confirmation emails or you're using ML/NLP to parse as much as possible? As a developer myself I'm interested in knowing how you deal handle those data inputs.

sgan317

Are these prices typically inclusive of all fees & destination charges? I don't see them called out specifically on the rate.

coleslaw

The sign up process is a bit clunky... it's not really clear that you're actually signing up (vs. just requesting a quote) and when you do sign up it's not clear if the FT code actually got applied. When I clicked "sign in" I was expecting to see a "don't have an account yet? click here to sign up" type of button.

abcx

I signed up but not sure if the FTEARLY code applied. I think somehow I might have already had an account? Had to do forgot password. Can you make sure the code got applied? Been an Autoslash user from the very beginning, so I'm excited about this.

pmarrsouth

I am not the original person who asked the question but my response to this (to expand on what OP followed up with) would be that I do not want my email address for that hotel booking in your hands, also there is a lot of other personal information on these booking confirmations including addresses, full names, loyalty numbers etc. If your site/db gets compromised, whoever gained access to it would have a lot of info on people. As most people unfortunately use the same email address and password for everything, the hacker now has a person's hilton number (for example), the email address associated to it and also the password used to sign up on HotelSlash, which probably matches their hilton honors and email password too. Hopefully you can see where I am going with this

cblaisd

I presume booking through you means we don't get our status perks at a hotel chain?