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Hip Escapes is a travel bargain hunter’s dream: it allows you to access discounts at fantastic hotels of up to 90% – for real!
Hip Escapes used to be called ‘Sheradill’, until they came to their senses and realised that while Sheradill might be a reasonable name for mouthwash, it was a terrible name for a discount luxury travel website.
The mechanics of how the site works and how you earn credit to discount the hotels you want to book haven’t really changed since I wrote about Sheradill last year, so I would strongly recommend having a read of that post if you haven’t already seen it.
I have now had the chance to use Sheradill / Hip Escapes twice, once for myself and once in order to book “Europe’s Leading Boutique Hotel”, Vila Joya, for my parents (you can check out their review here). Both deals ended up being genuinely 85%-90% cheaper than the best rates I could find elsewhere online. 5* boutique luxury for £28.75 per night, rather than £287.50 per night.
It sounds pretty implausible, and I fully admit I was sceptical, but everything went entirely to plan on both occasions. In fact, given that both stays were actually upgraded to suites, it worked out even better than expected!
Helping each other
Now that I have confirmed that Hip Escapes works as advertised, I thought it was a good time to share some of their latest offers and to set up an InsideFlyer UK Hip Escapes group on the forum, so we can all help each other get the best possible prices. I’ll get round to the offers in a moment, but just want to say a quick word about the forum group and what it is for.
With Hip Escapes, you earn credit towards particular deals by completing simple tasks, like clicking through to the hotel website. As well as earning personal credit, an additional 30% goes into a ‘community pot’ which discounts the hotel on those particular dates for all members. Therefore, the more popular a deal is, the more quickly it becomes discounted.
Therefore, I was thinking that we could all help each other by writing on the forum whenever we would like to take advantage of a particular deal, and asking everyone reading to help you discount it as much as possible (90% is the maximum discount), by completing some tasks related to that deal and so contributing to the ‘community pot’.
By helping each other, we can all quickly get the biggest discounts for the deals we want!
The deals
There are quite a few different properties and lots of different dates available at the moment, so these are just a few examples of what is possible.
(90% max discount applied, total price in Euros, per night price in £):
3 nights in March, Suite at Korakia Pensione Palm Springs: 151.50 Euros ( ~£45 per night) rather than 1,515 Euros ( ~£450 per night)
Weekends from Feb-May, Hotel Edouard 7 (Opera, Paris): 50 Euros (£22.50 per night) rather than 500 Euros (~£225 per night)
7 nights February-July, Hotel Balmoral Paris: 132 Euros (~£17 per night) rather than 1,320 Euros (£170 per night)
2 nights April-May, Kapari Natural Resort (Santorini): 80 Euros (~£36 per night) rather than 800 Euros (£360 per night)
2 nights January-March, The Gentlemen of Verona: 52 Euros (~ £23 per night) rather than 520 Euros (£230 per night)
2 nights January-February, Junior Suite, Relais Rione Ponte (Rome): 74.70 Euros (£33 per night) rather than 747.00 Euros (£330 per night)
2 nights March-April, 3 bedroom Suite, Erossea (Santorini): 180 Euros (£80 per night) rather than 1,800 Euros (£800 per night)
The deals have very limited availability and change all the time, so the above aren’t likely to last long but are available at time of writing.
20.00 Euros credit for signing up
If you sign up to Hip Escapes using a referral link you get 20.00 Euros credit (as does the person who refers you, so thanks if you use mine!). Please feel free to share your own referral link in the comments and on the forum.
Bottom Line
The deals you can get using Hip Escapes may be unbelievable, but they are also real!
Go and take a look for yourself and then join us on the forum if you have any questions or want some help getting the price of a deal down quickly!
Wow! I can’t really get my head around it until I start playing with it. But I’m assuming from your two posts that:
1. it’s not “I want to go to Paris on specific dates”. Instead they are offering limited inventory for specific dates that they reckon will never sell out?
2. some of the tasks are one offs? i.e. you can’t subscribe and unsubscribe to the newsletter for 20 euros off each time/deal?
But otherwise I think it’s a great idea to have a forum thread where people can help others with bringing down the cost.
Yeah, the easiest way to understand it is just to go and play around for a few minutes.
1) Exactly re the dates. That said, I’m not sure it’s distressed inventory that prompts hotels to take part (both bookings I made the hotels were sold out the whole time while there). Hip Escapes is a marketing arm of Hip Hotels (which itself seems to be a loose affiliation primarily for marketing boutique hotels), and I think they believe that the extra exposure and potential ‘buzz’ is good for business. I don’t know if the individual hotels are contracted into it as part of their general arrangement with Hip Hotels, or agree it separately. Interestingly, when I checked in the receptionist/owner mentioned the rate being complimentary so maybe Hip keep the 10% as their admin fee?
2) Yep good point, so it’s worth being a bit strategic about the deal you use those offers on. Also, some of the tasks can be completed not just for each deal, but every day for the same deal too.
Registered but no bonus, message sent to support……
Strange, I tested this immediately before posting because I couldn’t see the ts and cs for refer a friend anymore, and it worked fine – 20 Euros in the new account straight after confirming the account by clicking the link in the welcome email. I’m sure they will sort it.
Credited after first activity (e.g. choose hotel and re tweet). Chose Cloud7 for a layover in June and paid 20 for 2 nights instead of 90(real price) so works good on paper. Lets wait and see if more hotels sign up….
Cheers for the update – 10 Euros per night isn’t bad (even given Istanbul rates atm)!
There seems to be a fairly steady trickle of new offers as the old ones get bought up, I’ve never seen any dramatic increases in new hotels though.
I think your Euro:GBP exchange rate is a bit off !!
Oh no its not, you’ve listed total in Euros then per night in £ (as you state, to be fair) which is a rather unusual way of doing it.
This seems far too good to last though, surely ?
Yes, that was certainly a bit of a clumsy way of doing it on my part – apologies for the confusion!
I thought exactly the same thing when I posted about this last year (in fact, when I first saw it I wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t some kind of elaborate scam!), but it’s still going strong and even had a minor rebrand so I guess they must see some value in it.
Having mused about their business model a bit recently, I’ve decided it’s not as crazy as it first looks. Giving away a hotel room for 10% of normal rate probably just about covers the additional expense of it being occupied rather than being empty (particularly if guests have a drink in the bar etc). In a sense then, any exposure at all that a hotel gets is essentially free advertising. These are usually very small boutique places that lack the scale to justify expensive marketing, so it could be a smart solution. Where it falls down a bit is if hotels use rooms at times when they could have sold them anyway, but almost all hotels have relatively quiet times of year where there’s not too much risk of that.
If it became more well known (which I think surely it must do at some point?) then it would obviously be harder to find suitable availability, but on the other hand, maybe other hotels would join in due to the additional exposure. They could, of course, lift the maximum discount to 80% or whatever too, but that would still be a great deal. Market forces are probably the bigger threat to the biggest discounts – people can buy at any level of discount, if a deal seemed really popular and I really wanted it, I wouldn’t risk leaving it til 90% before I bought in case someone else snapped it up first.
Does anything show up for the UK? I’m looking around Sept for London & Scotland.
The only thing I’ve seen for UK was No.1 Aldwych (which looks really nice!) for about £50 per night, but that was back in June I think. I haven’t noticed anything else in the Uk since then.
I just signed up with your link. I think it is an interesting service, which I hope I can try soon. Unfortunately most deals are in Europe, but I think it may grow.
If anyone would like to sign up with my referral link, it’d be appreciated as we both get 20 euros: https://hipescapes.com/?ref=904840
Hi guys. I made a purchase with them for Cloud7 in Istanbul (I wanted to cancel, I know its non refundable) and guess what, the hotel did not have my reservation.
HipEscapes said that they cant find my reservation, when I asked for them to return the money as the reservation was not made with the hotel they stated that the purchases are non refundable.
Will go through the bank.
Hi Stan,
Thanks for the comment – that doesn’t sound great at all. Have you still got the email confirmations from when you booked? Hope you can get it sorted!
Yes I do have the email confirmation from when I booked. I have further contacted the bank and they started a payment dispute which the HipEscapes so far have ignored.
Hip Escapes have since cut off all communication and have not been responding to me or the bank.
I will get the money back if they continue to ignore this but I would think any business would avoid such reputation while the dealing with a matter concerning an amount of 20 Euro…
Absolutely – that sounds completely ridiculous! Hope you don’t have to waste too much more time sorting it out.