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On occasion, a travel hacker might wonder “What is the cheapest hotel?” I am not talking about “I’m going to Paris for the weekend, what are the cheapest hotel rates for my trip?” I’m thinking about different scenarios, such as:

Hotels.com Rewards

Hotels.com Rewards is almost certainly the simplest loyalty programme out there. Membership is free and members will:

• Collect 1 Reward Night Point for each night you stay at a participating hotel booked through Hotels.com.
• Collect 10 Reward Night Points and you earn a free night.
• The maximum pre-tax value of your free night is determined by the average price you paid over the 10 qualifying nights. You can pay the difference for hotels costing more, but will lose any excess if you stay somewhere cheaper than your available balance

You must stay on a hotels.com booking once every 12 months, however, otherwise your accumulated balance will expire. So, what can do you if you’ve built up 8 Reward Night Points, but you don’t have any actual hotel requirements before your 12 months is up? Well, you book the cheapest hotel in the world you can find. As long as you prepay, hotels.com don’t care if you actually check in. So you will reach ten nights and a voucher will arrive to your account. Sure the average value will be lower, but any value is higher than zero!

However hotels.com have hundreds of thousands of options, how do you find the cheapest?

Airbnb

Perhaps you want to sign-up for Airbnb and earn 1,000 miles from Delta Skymiles with your first booking. You can find further details on this website. Wouldn’t it be great to find a host that charges £1 or less for an Airbnb night so that you can simply book one night and earn the bonus?

IHG Rewards Club – Accelerate

Perhaps you have received some interesting targets (with nice bonuses attached) that can be met with one or two stays. Perhaps you can tick off a foreign country, a certain brand and a weekend stay with a simple weekend away overseas. But which city/country is likely to have the lowest room rates?

Club Carlson Free Fridays

Joe wrote about this ongoing promotion a few weeks ago. You can earn one free Friday night – good this autumn-  for each two paid stays booked directly. Perhaps you don’t want to actually pay for expensive London hotels, but instead find a really cheap alternative elsewhere. But where?

End of Year Status Hunt

Perhaps you are a couple of stays short of a desirable level of elite status with a major hotel chain. But unfortunately you don’t have a reasonably priced option in the vicinity of your home to do a mattress run. So you might again be tempted by a quick trip overseas to pick up those desired night / stay credits more cost-effectively. But where?

Cheapesthotelintheworld.com

I recently stumbled across this website. You can reach it by clicking here. It isn’t the most well-designed, pretty website. And I don’t know where the underlying data is sourced from, or for which dates their quoted rates apply.

But if you are curious for ideas about typically cheap hotels, split down by hotel chain or even OTAs such as hotels.com (Expedia), then perhaps their website is worth a quick peek…

Do you ever find yourself wondering about the cheapest hotels in the world? For reasons other than ones I’ve mentioned? Let us know in the comments section.