Hotels’ special offers sometimes outdo their own ‘best’ rates

So you’re shopping around on the Web for the best deal on a hotel room and you find one on the hotel’s official website that suits your budget.

Swayed by the site’s best-rate guarantee, you book the room, never suspecting that lower rates might be a mouse-click away -- on that very same site.

Many major hotel chains offer some type of best-rate guarantee for prices on their sites, usually valid within 24 hours of booking the room.

But sometimes lower rates might be lurking in other areas of a website, as I recently discovered. What then becomes of the best-rate guarantee might surprise you.

Trying to book a room in New York recently so I could take in the Christo public art display in Central Park, I found a Westin Essex House room on Starwood.com for $279 a night for four nights.

It was covered by Starwood’s best-rate guarantee, which says that a guest should “feel confident that you will always get the best available rate at any of our hotels.”

Ever the shopper, I clicked on Starwood’s special offers. There I found a deal for four nights for the price of three at the same hotel, same room and same dates. The nightly rate was $319 but averaged $239 a night with the free night -- a savings of $40 a night off the “guaranteed best” rate I’d already found.

How could Starwood claim to have given me the best rate when I found a better one on its own site? I wanted to find out, so I posed the question.

“The best-rate guarantee is really designed to make consumers feel they have the best rate versus a third-party website,” Tom Botts, vice president of global leisure sales and strategy for Starwood, told me. “It isn’t really designed to be used against our own site.”

Botts said Starwood would not have honored its best-rate guarantee and given me the lower rate on its site if I had found it after booking the higher rate.

But, he said, “in general our policy is we’d make sure the consumer was happy with the purchase they made.”

I looked at some other hotel-chain sites, including Hilton, Hyatt and Radisson. All have boxes or pull-down menus to check for AARP and AAA rates and a “special offers” section on the home page. In my research, Hilton appeared to be listing all of its website’s available rates in a single search.

“Any time the customer goes into any of our hotel paths we always serve up our best available rate,” said Bala Subramanian, senior vice president of distribution for Hilton.

Here are some ways to get the best rate on a hotel chain’s site:

* If you are a member of AARP (www.aarp.com) or AAA (www.aaa.com), make sure those rates are displayed in your initial search.

I found an AARP rate of about $172 a night for my mother, an AARP member, for the Sheraton Hotel Pulitzer last March in Amsterdam.

That was $77 less a night than what I paid for my room. If you are not an AARP or auto club member, you may find a rate that makes it worthwhile to join. (You must be at least 50 to belong to AARP; membership is $12.50 a year; AAA membership costs $65 the first year.)

Note that Hilton now requires you to enter your AAA membership number to have the rate appear.

* After you’ve done your initial search, print out the results for comparison purposes, and check the “special offers” section of the website to see whether a better deal is available.

* Save hotel fliers and e-mails. Sometimes they contain a special promotion code that you can’t find on the website.

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Contact James Gilden at www.theinternettraveler.com.