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Five top hacks for bagging a last-minute hotel ‘superbooking’

bedroom with green walls and floral pillows on bed - Jake Eastham
bedroom with green walls and floral pillows on bed - Jake Eastham

Johnny-come-latelys, rejoice. With international travel able to restart from Monday, May 17, those who have spread their holiday booking eggs across multiple baskets at home and away look set to be the cause of cancellations, with some of the country’s finest hotels that were previously booked up (luxury spa hotel Chewton Glen in Hampshire, for instance) now offering availability. If you missed out on the initial frenzy, fear not: we spoke to our hotel guru, Fiona Duncan, to get her top five tips on bagging a last-minute hotel ‘superbooking’.
Rachel Cranshaw

1. Follow your favourite hotels on social media... ...and particularly check Instagram and Facebook.

This is an excellent way for hotels to advertise sudden availability, using 24-hour Stories rather than the grid on Instagram, as the latter may be out of date by the time the follower has seen it. Typically a hotel will post a cancellation 24 to 72 hours in advance, so if you are looking for last-minute weekend availability, keep checking the Instagram and Facebook pages of your favourite hotels from mid-week onwards.

2. Check for Next Available

In direct response to the new trend hotels are seeing for increased cancellations but still strong demand for rooms, The Pig hotels are developing (shortly to be launched) a ‘Next Available’ feature whereby if the date you want at a particular hotel is not available, the website will handily give you the next date on which a room is free. This information is ‘live’, so reliable and not stale. While only a handful of hotels currently have this option, it is expected that many will incorporate it soon.

country house surrounded by green and trees
country house surrounded by green and trees

3. Keep checking online

It sounds obvious, but hotel websites (and online travel booking agencies) these days usually have easily accessible systems that can change all the time. The information you see is ‘live’ and current and automatically updated as rooms become available or booked.

4. ...But also don’t forget the telephone

Even in 2021, it can still sometimes pay to go analogue. Reservation teams are up to the minute with availability, which can change constantly, so it’s worth phoning round. It’s good to hear a human voice and to ask to be put on a waiting list if a cancellation comes up; reservations staff can also explain in more detail than a website about the layout of rooms/extra bed options/flexibility. My tried and tested way of helping people find hotel rooms is to direct them to the Telegraph’s brilliant hotels homepage, choose a county they would like to visit, and then phone every one of the hotels listed in that country that they like the sound of/suits what they are looking for. Nine times out of 10, there is luck to be had.

5. Think small

It’s especially worth using the phone or the establishment’s own website for smaller places such as inns; they may not use social media to advertise cancellations and they can’t spare the manpower to manipulate OTAs such as Booking.com; rather, they prefer to take bookings directly. Try the East End Arms near Lymington and the Felin Fach Griffin in Wales’ Brecon Beacons.

Especially if the hotels of your choice are full, don’t discount such places when looking for somewhere to go: they include some of the loveliest and most comfortable places to stay in the country. Some boutique hotels are part of groups, too, so even if the one you had in mind is full, another may have space (the Beckford Arms group, for example, has seen recent heavy bookings, but at the time of writing still has some rooms available across its properties).