Today Only: Get 10% Cash Back on Many Hotel Reservations
Update: Some offers mentioned below are no longer available. View the current offers here.
While it is more fun to use points to cover hotel stays than spend actual cash, we all know that sometimes cash is king when you need to book a place to stay. Even those who are pretty savvy with miles and points can sometimes forget the important step of checking cash-back sites before heading directly to a hotel's homepage to book a stay with dollars.
Just like you may already go to an online airline shopping or cash back site before you order a new outfit or back to school supplies, you can do the same exact thing with some big hotel chains to put cash or miles back in your pockets. Not only is that step always important to maximize the money you spend on travel, but today is a "Travel Thursday," which means that Ebates has higher than normal cash back rates for some travel-focused retailers -- this includes several major hotel chains!
If you make a hotel reservation today by going through Ebates you can get up to 10% cash-back at Marriott, IHG, Hilton and more. In this case, Ebates is just a pass-through website that takes you to the hotels' individual booking sites to make your reservations, so earning cash back does not impact your ability to earn points and use elite status benefits. It is just a great way to get cash-back after you complete your stay -- at 10% back, it is a step that is probably worth the effort.
Earn Up To 10% Cash Back on Hotels Stays Booked Today
Marriott: 10% cash back
Hilton: Up to 10% cash back (though Gold and Diamond members annoyingly only get 1% back)
IHG: 10% cash back
There are some other increased travel-related increased cash back offers available on Ebates that you can browse here, but be careful to not make you actual hotel bookings on the Ebates site if you want it to be eligible for earning points and elite perks. Just use the Ebates site to get to the actual hotel's booking site if you care about points and perks (and most of us here at TPG care very much about those things). Since you are still booking on the hotels' sites as usual, you can pay with your Chase Sapphire Reserve to earn 3x points on the travel charge or even use a co-branded hotel credit card to rack up extra points that way.
At 10% cash back, Ebates likely has the best offering today for the hotel chains mentioned above -- but generally speaking you will want to quickly compare cash back rates at Cashbackmonitor.com to see which site will give you the best payout when you are spending money for hotel stays. If you are looking for some other ways to maximize hotel reservations when you have to spend cash, check out this post.