Last Minute Travel Club – Significant Savings at Times?

There are lots of options for booking hotels online. Most of the travel sites are selling the same inventory and prices are quite uniform. Sometimes opaque sites likes Hotwire and Priceline can offer significant savings, but you cannot be sure about the property.

Last Minute Travel Club requires you to become their member in order to search for prices. Luckily, they have continuous promotions for free membership that would otherwise cost $49.99. You can access the current free sign up offer here.

Some of the prices that the Last Minute Travel Club (LMTC) offers are truly low. On the Burbank Marriott example below, their price is about half of the AAA rate that you can find on Marriott.com and third of the best flexible rate on the same site.

Note that some of the prices are “on request” meaning that they are not able to confirm your reservation online. According to the information on LMTC, they will get back to you in 48 hours during which the hotel should have either accepted or rejected the reservation.

All their prices are prepaid and you cannot access them unless you become a member. Some of these prices would have offered a great BRG opportunity (Best Rate Guarantee) with hotel chains, but you cannot use LMTC for that purpose as you need to become a member first.

Here are three examples about their pricing.

Burbank Marriott

The lowest price on Marriott.com is AAA rate of $169.

The price on LMTC is $101.24

InterContinental Bali

The price with breakfast is $267 on brand website.

LMTC “On Request” price is $224.40.

W Montreal

The price on spg.com is 359 CAD.

LMTC has an instant confirmation price of $221.63.

Conclusion

Some of the prices on LMTC are really low. I am not sure what inventory they have access to that would enable them to offer some of the hotels at such a low prices.

Lot of the inventory that is displayed are Travelodges etc. but there are quite a few Marriott, InterContinental Hotels Group, and Starwood properties as well.

I can see myself checking out the prices on LMTC once in a while when I don’t otherwise have access to an acceptable price. Some of the chains do honor the elite benefits even on third party stays like the ones booked through LMTC.  It is unfortunate that you cannot price match to LMTC due to their “membership” set up.