DreamCheaper is like AutoSlash for hotels. It’s like what Yapta was supposed to be for airfares. It keeps checking the price of your hotel room, and helps you cancel and rebook when the price goes down.
Yapta was all about getting you refunds when airfares dropped. Airlines used to do that, remember? They’d issue you a voucher (you’d likely be on the hook for a change fee if you wanted an actual refund). Airlines tightened up those policies and now it’s mostly just frustrating to learn that the price of a ticket you booked went down.
AutoSlash will check your car rental prices and rebook, and I’ve had fantastic success with this. Originally you could book your initial reservation through AutoSlash, but the major car rental companies all stopped allowing AutoSlash to display their cars. Now you book your car somewhere else, give your reservation to AutoSlash, and they’ll save you money.
No doubt the hotel industry will find a way to crack down here. But for now, you forward your booking to hotel -at- dreamcheaper.com and they’ll track the price of your reservation for you. They charge you 20% of your savings.
I pinged DreamCheaper on how the booking process works (wanted to make sure customers don’t lose loyalty points and elite credit). This this TechCrunch piece suggests reservations are made directly through the chain.
Hi Gary! We’ll always rebook for you, so you don’t have to worry about anything. Hotel based loyalty points & credits will always be assigned to you, but booking platform-specific points may be lost. Simply ask yourself whether you prefer a cheaper price or loyalty points.
Indeed, if you had booked through Expedia, Orbitz, et al (and thus wouldn’t have earned points in a hotel’s loyalty program) you’ll give up points in the (more or less worthless) Expedia+ Rewards program or the (much better) Orbitz Rewards program.
But you’ll earn loyalty program points and elite status credit when re-booking through DreamChaser. Good to know!
(HT: Alan H.)
“DreamCheaper”, “Yapta”, “AutoSlash”, “Uber”, “AirBNB”
All crap names. All Millennial, anti-American garbage. All software worms on government monitored smart phones.
Watch them all collapse, especially non-money making, bank slush funded “Uber”.
@Ed
I love uplifting positive posts 🙂
This will kill portal cashback, though. Can they only rebook if they save me, after their fees, more than 5%?
What if I cancel the reservation later or plans change? I assume the charge still stands?
Thanks for bringing up this option. Have you used them yourself?
So you have to hand over your real name & address plus hotel loyalty program number and tons of other information to DreamCheaper. Who guarantees the security of that information for savings that MAY or MAY NOT materialize?
When you have erectile dysfunction (aka ED), your frustration often manifests itself in strange ways. Anyhow, far from being “anti-American,” Uber in particular seems to represent good ol’ bloodsucking, exploitative capitalist greed at its finest…. As American as apple pie.
I have a booking with them this weekend that I am using as a test run. I called the hotel to confirm my reservation after it was rebooked at a lower rate and and was told that it was booked using a wholesaler (in this case Expedia). Assuming this thread is still open next week I will report back on what happens.
So when I checked in tonight (at a Sheraton) I found out that the rate did not in fact earn any starwood points (which didn’t surprise me given I was rebooked via expedia) The sort of good news is that I got stay credit towards status, and my current status level was honored. So mixed results overall, so I would advise you pick and choose which reservations you use with this service based on your price versus points preference in each case. I would have preferred that they send an email like Autoslash so I could choose if I wanted to rebook instead of them automatically canceling the original reservation, but perhaps that will come in a later iteration of the service.