$25 Free Credit When You Join Roomer – Hotel Booking Website

Update: Read our full review on Roomer here.

Roomer is a hotel booking website with a twist. They allow users to sell their unused nonrefundable rooms to other users. For example, let’s say you book a room in NYC for NYE and then suddenly your best friend let’s you know they are having a party. You couldn’t possibly miss your friends party but you obviously don’t want to lose the $1,000 you’ve most likely spent on booking a room in NYC. Enter Roomer, you list your hotel room on the website they then discount the room and on sell it to somebody looking for a room in NYC during the same time period.

Roomer is able to do this because it’s possible to change the name of a hotel reservation in most cases without voiding the booking or incurring any charges. This is all handled by Roomer. It’s a win-win-win situation. At the moment it’s possible to get $25 in credit for free when you sign up to Roomer, this is being marketed as a thanksgiving promotion but a similar promo was run earlier in the year.

Click here to sign up to Roomer and get $25 for free

Full disclosure, if you use my link and make a booking of $50 or more then I’ll also receive $25 in free credits. I appreciate you using my links whenever possible.

Mini Review

I’m interested in the concept of Roomer and I love sign up bonuses. I’m going to make a booking for two nights for the 27th-29th of November so I can review this site in more detail but for now I have a few thoughts.

  • The actual discounts are quite low. Most of the rooms are less than 20% off the advertised rate (most are actually under 10%), given that you can effectively get 17% off hotels.com by using their stay 10 nights get 1 night free promotion and shopping through topcashback for another 7% (there is also currently a $20 promo code you can use on bookings of three nights or longer).
  • There is A LOT of availability. I did my search for Bangkok for two nights and it listed over 200 properties that were available. I can’t see it being the case that they have that much inventory which leads me to believe they are acting as a traditional hotel booking website as well. That’s pretty disappointing and probably goes to explain why the discounts are so low.
  • It’s lacking a lot of functionality. I wanted to find a room near the MRT or BTS in Bangkok, as I hate getting taxis here. If I zoomed in on the map it would not change the hotels listed in the main column (which AirBnB and other sites do by default). It’s also not possible to specify facilities, hotel chains, areas and the price slider sucks (just let me enter my own range in digit format as well as a slider, please!)
  • Some filters don’t work properly, or at all. I tried doing a search and sorting by “discount”, you’d think this would’ve showed me the rooms with the highest discount first. Nope, Roomer actually showed me a room that was more expensive through Roomer than it was with booking.com. I then did a separate search and opted to see hotels that had a tripadvisor rating of 4+, I got a bunch of 3.5 rooms instead (I guess it automatically rounds up).

Overall I think it’s a fantastic concept but the discounts aren’t large enough to make this an attractive option. Browsing the last minute deals section does have some great deals (e.g up to 80% off on nice hotels) but there are still too few of them. Assuming the original booker gets hotel loyalty points and it qualifies towards elite status, this might be a way for people doing mattress runs to recoup some of their costs. I’ve reached out to the people at Roomer for an interview. Do you have any questions for them? If so, let me know in the comments and I’ll be sure to ask.

My current plan is to use this site for the initial $25 bonus, I’ll occasionally check the last minute deals and the site itself to see how it compares but at this stage I can’t see myself using it regularly. I hope Roomer can improve on their service and site because as I said, I really like the concept.

P.S If you haven’t already, make sure you sign up to Hotel Engine to get another $25 in free hotel credits. I’ll also receive $25 in hotel engine credits after you complete your stay. You can view my original post on Hotel Engine here and an interview I did with their CMO here. I appreciate you using my referral links when possible.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

3 Comments
newest
oldest most voted

Matt
Matt (@guest_54826)
December 25, 2014 14:20

Is the minimum spend only $50 for this deal? (to get $25 off)

Matt
Matt (@guest_54905)
December 26, 2014 00:36

Thanks for clarifying