Hotel and Travel Deals Blog

It’s hard for us to believe that it’s been 20 days since we took the covers off of DealBase.com. While the world seems to be focused on which startup is cutting staff or throwing in the towel, we continue to see a huge opportunity to build a better experience for finding travel deals and specials. We’re keeping our expenses very low (they never were high to begin with!) and are obsessively focused on delivering a product that helps you find great savings and value when you travel.

Today is the mid-point between our soft launch date and our public launch date 3 weeks from now. So it’s a good time to recap where what we’ve accomplished in the last 20 days: Read the rest of this entry »

DealBase.com will be presenting at the Travel Innovation Summit on November 17, 2008 in Hollywood, CA. (If you still need a hotel, here are some hotel deals and specials for West Hollywood.) We’ll have a lot of new things to show off, so come by our demo and vote for us to be one of the six finalists. We’ll be in good company as I’m looking forward to seeing demos from Josh, Yen and other friends who have great products as well. We’ll be at the PhoCusWright show all week, so please drop us a line if you’d like to connect.

Lately, I’ve been shocked with how much a San Francisco hotel will charge for breakfast or parking.

Either of these could easily be $50, so I’m searching for free breakfast or free parking in deals to maximize my savings and not get shocked by over priced breakfast or overnight parking charges.

Here is a great deal I found at the San Francisco Fairmont with free parking.

This week was an eventful one – I’m referring to the preview launch of DealBase.com of course! We’ll be officially launching the site in November, but we couldn’t wait to get our service in front of the public, as we are obsessive about incorporating user feedback. So, please let us know what you think via our GetSatisfaction support community. In fact, we’ve already made some changes to the site based on early user feedback.

When you take a look at DealBase.com, you’ll see that we offer a better way to find great hotel deals and discounts. People have posted over 7000 hotel deals, and more are added each day to over 400 deal destinations.  Read the rest of this entry »

I recently booked two trips on my favorite airline, Virgin.    My first was a trip from San Francisco to London.  I bought my normal economy tickets online and coach seating was about $700. I checked to see the cost of business class was and it was about twice the price.  Too much.  But before I checked out I looked for the “upgrade” option.  It turns out that to upgrade my ticket from San Francisco to London outbound was only $100 – well worth the price considering it was an overnight flight.  The return was $650, and I passed on that.  I think if I would have been just going through the motions, I would have missed that golden opportunity to upgrade the outbound for a relative pittance.

My next trip was from San Francisco to Las Vegas. I didn’t see any upgrade option when I checked in online, so when I arrived at the airport and checked my bag I asked.  For only $50 I was upgraded to First Class.  Wow, and as I am typing this out I am in sitting in Virgin America’s first class section and let me tell ya – it’s buff.  Well worth the $50 – heck I will lose that in the first 20 minutes of betting tonight!

So the lesson here is always, always ask for the upgrade.   Often you’ll be pleasantly surprised.  …Now back to my latte ad in-flight entertainment in my monster reclining seat.