Quick post here. Had a very satisfying experience with lastminute.com’s Top Secret Hotels service on Thursday, and just wanted to mention it.
With tickets to see oh-so-middle-of-the-road Razorlight in the temple to corporate entertainment that is the O2 and a very early start the next morning, my gorgeous date and I were hoping to break the massive journey back south with a hotel in town.
Having previously crashed at the swish Hilton London Tower Bridge Hotel when unable to crawl home after a particulalry liquid birthday celebration, we were keen the repeat the experience with enhanced soberiety. Unfortunately, explicit last minute offers for this hotel were thin on the ground and the Hilton site still had rooms are around £170 – too rich for our budget.
Instead, we opted to use lastminute.com’s Top Secret Hotel service, where late deal rooms are super cheap on the basis that you are not told exactly which hotel you are committing to prior to pulling the trigger on the booking. Not as terrifying as it sounds, you get to see the important details beforehand (star-rating, room details, hotel facilities) and refine the search to a certain location. In fact, if you know the area in which you are booking well, you might get enough info to work out which hotel you are being offered in advance.
We thought we’d managed this trick when picking our ’secret hotel’ to be a nice four-star place that we thought was on Southwark Road. For £69 we were pretty happy. Turns out we had it totally wrong and the £69 hotel we were booked into was actually the Hilton London Tower Bridge Hotel we’d wanted in the first place! A quick check on the Hilton website post our booking showed they were still offering the same rooms at top price, so effectively we’d made a saving of about £100 – result!
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I had always wondered how these top secret bookings actually work – sounds like you really scored
Yeah, it’s a great service. Apparently lots of people at my girl’s work use it for booking their work trips…if you are going somewhere regularly, I guess it’s just a case of knowing the description of all the likely candidate hotels well enough to remove the uncertainty.
Glad to hear you had a good time, I hope you don’t mind but I’ve linked to you in my Top Secret Hotel story. Thanks