Do you have frequent paid stays at Starwood, Hilton, or Hyatt hotels?
If so, you might want to consider signing-up for StayAngel, a new hotel reservation monitoring and price alert service. It’s a paid service, but could be worth it for frequent travelers.
StayAngel watches your existing reservations for price drops, inexpensive suite upgrades, and lower prices on other sites. And they’ll even submit Best Rate Guarantee claims for you if they find a lower price!
For folks who don’t yet have reservations, you can tell them your desired hotel and how much you want to pay, and they’ll let you know if a room becomes available at that price.
And if rooms go on sale for more than 50% off the lowest prepaid rate, you’ll be notified by email.
But is the service worth paying for?
How Does StayAngel Work?
Link: StayAngel
StayAngel launched this summer so it’s still new.Here are some of the things they’ll do for you:
- Price Alert – Notifies you when a lower price becomes available on an existing reservation
- Suite Alert – Notifies you if a suite becomes available at a price 20% more than your current regular room rate
- Deal Catcher – Notifies you of rooms that go on sale for more than 50% off the lowest standard prepaid rate
- Guardian Angel – Looks for lower prices on other sites for rooms you’ve already booked, and if a lower rate is found, automatically submits a Best Rate Guarantee claim with the hotel chain on your behalf
- Upgrade Alert – Emails or texts you if you get an upgrade on an existing reservation
- Price Monitor – If you want to stay at a specific hotel, but only want to pay a maximum amount, you can give them a date range and price and they’ll notify you if it becomes available
A basic membership is free, but you don’t get much (only upgrade alerts, promo alerts, and 2 hotel price monitors). However, once you sign-up, you can activate a 7-day free trial premium membership to check out the features.
There’s a deal on Plus and Premium memberships until December 31, 2014. These offer more features, but you’ll pay $7 per month (normally $9 per month) for a Plus membership, and $14 per month (normally $18 per month) for a Premium membership.
StayAngel currently only accepts PayPal, but you can change or cancel your membership at any time.
How Do You Sign-Up?
Link: StayAngel Registration
You can sign-up for a free membership by entering your details on the StayAngel registration page.
You’ll be prompted to link your Starwood, Hilton, and Hyatt accounts.
You’ll be asked for your account numbers and passwords for Starwood and Hyatt, so that StayAngel can access your current reservations. StayAngel uses encryption to make sure your login credentials are safe.
For Hilton, the process is slightly different. StayAngel will issue you a unique email address, which you add to your Hilton account. Then, when you book a reservation, the details will automatically be sent to the unique email address, and StayAngel will get the reservation information.
They’ll also forward every email they receive at the StayAngel address to your regular email address.
Note: Only reservations that appear in your online profile can be used by StayAngel. So if you made a reservation over the phone, for example, it might not show up in your online account.Once you’ve added your hotel information, it takes some time to verify your log-in and pull up your current reservations. When I signed-up, it took a couple of hours.
To try out the premium membership free for 7 days, click the “Activate Now” button on the member home page.
Without having to do anything, StayAngel found my Hyatt reservation and checked for cheaper rates online (it didn’t find any). You can modify your account settings to have it check for cheaper rates at a frequency of your choice (from every 6 hours to every 4 weeks).
I set up a price alert for a hotel in Hawaii to see if it would find anything. So far, no luck. But it will keep looking!
Is It Worth It?
If you pay to stay at Starwood, Hilton, or Hyatt hotels on a regular basis, StayAngel could save you time and money.
Folks who like to keep checking back for cheaper deals or file Best Rate Guarantee claims will save time, because StayAngel does all the work for you. That doesn’t always mean they will find a cheaper rate, so you won’t necessarily save money.
I don’t have any personal experience with StayAngel finding lower rates, so I can’t really say how much you’ll save.
But because you get a free 7-day trial, you can check it out for yourself and see if it’s a useful service for you. Even if you sign-up for their paid service, you can pay monthly and cancel at any time if you find it isn’t saving you time or money.
Bottom Line
StayAngel is a new hotel reservation and price alert service. It monitors your current Starwood, Hilton, and Hyatt reservations for price drops, if inexpensive suites are available, upgrades, and promotions. It will even file Best Rate Guarantee claims on your behalf!A starter membership is free, but you won’t have access to most of their useful features. Paid memberships cost $7 to $14 per month (until December 31, 2014), depending on the level of benefits you want.
But new members get a 7-day trial premium membership to check out all the elements of StayAngel. I like that you can preview the site to see if it’s useful for you before committing to a full membership. That said, you can cancel a paid membership at any time.
I don’t have enough experience with the site to say if it’s worth it or not, but if you’re a very frequent traveler with lots of paid stays at Starwood, Hilton, or Hyatt hotels, it could save you time and money.
Have you used StayAngel? What do you think?