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We recently featured details of a good value/”nothing to lose” offer with an impressive looking new hotel club. In short, sign up here before 31st October 2016 and you will get one year’s completely free membership to Club1 Hotels, which will ordinarily retail at $675.

We’re reminding you of this deal as Club1hotels have just made it even sweeter with a free credit giveaway – just read below for full details. 

First though, the obvious questions are why you would ever pay $675 to join Club 1 Hotels, and why they are offering a year’s membership for free. I am the eternal cynic and it does seem a tiny bit too good to be true, so I’ll address those two points in turn…

What’s the deal with Club1 Hotels?

Club1Hotels sell hotel rooms at wholesale rates, without making any money on them. While most hotel booking sites (Expedia etc) take a commission on the rate that you pay for your stay, Club1Hotels offers you the direct price.

Instead, they make their cut with their annual membership fee.

As a result, Club1Hotels is one of the very cheapest way to book 4 and 5-star hotels.

In addition to those flagged in our previous article, I had a quick test of rates myself. While they’re not always cheaper (not least based on some hotels reserving the lowest rates for direct bookings, as absolutely seems to be the case for Hilton). My findings based on two random days at random London hotels in November were as follows:

Mercure London Heathrow

Direct = £117 for two nights

Club1hotels = £97 for two nights

Thistle City Barbican

Direct = £244 for two nights

Club1hotels = £176 for two nights

Hilton Euston

Direct = £282 for two nights

Club1hotels = £294 for two nights

So there clearly is (and is not) better value to be had on Club1hotels. Once you have got used to its slightly clunky technology (which, to be fair, is actually quite similar to – and presumably derived from – the technology that travel agents navigate when they are booking wholesale), it’s therefore well worth a price comparison, as you may just save yourself a few quid.

So if they make all their money from the membership fee, why are they waiving it?

Club1Hotels are simply letting you test the site for a year. They are sufficiently confident that you’ll like it sufficiently that they will then make some money from you in year 2, should you choose to renew your subscription. But if you don’t, that’s not a problem. There’s no auto-renewal or credit card details that need to be supplied. If you don’t want to continue into year 2, you do not have to.

And that’s not all…

In addition to the free Club1Hotels membership, they have also offered us $251 free credit to give away to one reader. To enter the competition, you simply need to sign up to Club1Hotels via this link, and leave a random comment in the comments section below. Please ensure that when you sign up to comment you leave a valid email address, or we won’t be able to contact you if you win.

If you’ve already signed up to Club1Hotels (we appreciate that our initial post about them went out a few days ago), you will still be eligible for the competition – just make sure you use the same email address as you used to sign up to Club1.

The competition will run until midnight (UK time) on Friday 14 October, and the winner will be contacted on the following Monday. InsideFlyer UK will choose the winner via random.org.

If you’re wondering why we are offering a slightly uneven $251 free credit… well a few other travel blogs have run similar comps offering $250 credit. We wanted to make sure we went 1 better 🙂