Last June I reviewed the hotel site Room77.com and its feature of showing the view from specific rooms in a hotel. It is kind of like SeatGuru for hotels.
Room77.com has grown over the past year with new features. The website now loads a more traditional looking hotel rate search homepage. Room77 is a metasearch engine that compares rates from different hotel booking sites in the way Kayak.com functions, but with more useful search capabilities for the loyalty traveler seeking hotel points and group rates.
Room77 has added the option to check AAA and Senior rates to its hotel search. The booking engine also shows rates bookable directly through Room77 and eligible for earning hotel loyalty points.
The general rule of thumb is a hotel booking made through a third party online travel agency like Orbitz, Expedia or Travelocity does not earn hotel loyalty points for the stay. Room77 has a competitive advantage with its loyalty points earning potential for some bookings.
Hotel Preference Filters
One of the most useful features of Room77 is the ability to filter hotels offering free parking, free breakfast, free wifi and free airport shuttle. Wifi and breakfast are generally stated clearly on a hotel website, but finding out if the hotel has free parking I find often requires a direct phone call to the hotel.
You can also filter award winner hotels on Room77.
Earning Loyalty Points with Room77
One of the Room77 website reviews I read last week stated the site offers the user the ability to quickly determine if the booking earns loyalty points. I did not find this to be the case in rate checks I made.
Los Angeles Hotel Search for April 21 filtered for Hyatt Hotels
Hyatt Regency Century Plaza shows the lowest online rate is through otel.com at $348 compared to $359 through Room77 and Hyatt’s own website. Potential Best Rate Guarantee claim and 20% off the rate.
The Room77 page shows rates for Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, but there is still no indication if the rate offers Hyatt Gold Passport loyalty points.
Clicking the first choice for Room 77 brings up a rate that can be cancelled up to day before arrival and offers Room77 Concierge service which the site states means they will make an effort to get you into a room with the amenities you want in terms of view and floor.
But there is no indication if this rate earns loyalty points. So I click on the identically priced rate that says “Pay at Hotel”.
This rate indicates it earns Gold Passport points.
This loyalty points indicator would be more useful if I was seeing it on the previous screen showing all the Room77 rates for the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza. That is time-consuming to click through rates looking for rates that earn loyalty points.
Room77 offers some useful features for a meta-search engine like the ability to filter hotels for free parking, breakfast, internet and airport shuttle.
The ability to check AAA and senior rates is a competitive advantage for the site over most other online travel agencies. I also find the site does a good job filtering hotels by hotel chain. I simply typed Choice in my Los Angeles search and Room77 filtered the hotels to Choice Hotels brands.
These filter features certainly make Room77 a site I will use in addition to Kayak.com for checking hotel rates on a metasearch site. Room77 is another useful site for initial research and locating potential Best Rate Guarantee claim discounts.
As usual I will likely start my hotel stay planning on sites like Room77 and Kayak, but then head over to the hotel brand site for my actual booking.
That way I am sure to get loyalty points for all my stays.
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