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I wrote last month about the possible end of Accor Happy Mondays – Accor Hotels’ brilliant weekly promotion that let you book UK hotels for as little as £25. Accor assured customers that Happy Mondays was just taking a break for a week and it seemed to be working as usual since.
As I said at the time though, “the offer being cancelled for a week because there “are not enough hotels participating” sounds slightly fishy, and isn’t exactly a sign that the offer is in tremendous health”, but there was really no choice but to accept the explanation and hope for the best.
Fast forward to this evening when I wanted to check Happy Mondays availability and I saw this:
Uh oh!!!
I don’t like the sound of a “new range of exclusive offers” one bit, and the text at the bottom is even more concerning:
“This offer has now ended, BUT COME BACK NEXT WEEK to discover our NEW SET OF EXCLUSIVE OFFERS – SECRET DEALS BY ACCORHOTELS, giving you access to at least 20% discount and exclsuive (sic) hotel packages in the UK.”
A 20% discount? Not quite as exciting as £25 rooms…
To be fair, it does say a minimum of 20%, so hopefully there might be larger discounts, but I’m not hugely optimistic. Exclusive packages (whether you can spell exclusive or not!) might be interesting or they might not – but again, it’s unlikely to be as good a deal as Happy Mondays.
Bottom line
We don’t have any proper details yet about what the changes will be and it’s entirely possible I’m being too negative here – but I really did love Happy Mondays.
To be fair to Accor, I can definitely see where they might be coming from with this sort of change. Happy Mondays’ use of fixed price points made it simple for guests, but extremely inflexible for hotels. You can imagine a lot of scenarios where hotels wanted to sell some last minute rooms cheaply, but not for £25/£40/£60.
As ever with ‘travel hacking’, good deals come and go all the time – the trick is to be flexible and enjoy them while they last. Maybe the end of Accor Happy Mondays won’t be that bad, but I’ll certainly be sad to see it go.
A great, great shame. Those £25 Ibis rooms in London were an absolute godsend. I will wait and see what happens next week, but I’m not hopeful.
I must have missed you telling us about the break.
Logged on a few hrs ago to see if I could get something for next weekend and found the page telling me the deal had ended.
Very disappointed 🙁
Maybe it’ll come back in the winter months again to drive UK winter weekend sales.
Looks like it’s gone the same way as Club Carlson’s 2-4-1 and 4-4-2 deals, which were the only worthwhile thing about that program.
No no no!
Best ever hotel offer – I use this all the time , so disappointed.
The problem with “last minute deals” is that people clue into the fact that they can book a cancellable/refundable rate and then cancel and re-book at the lower rate. So instead of filling empty rooms, the hotel just loses revenue…
Sad to see it go, but unfortunately it was probably too “travel hack-able” to be sustainable.