Hotel Engine, as the name suggests is a hotel booking website. Their main premise was that they had an easy to understand loyalty program, you either earned 5% or 10% back depending on the hotel. They also had a referral program where new users got $25 and the person referring them received $25 when that person finished their stay.
I always thought that Hotel Engine was going to struggle in such a crowded market place, 5% or 10% back is fine but it’s not fantastic when other sites are regularly giving away discounts of 15%+. Hotel Engine has been putting more and more emphasis on their business booking website.
Unfortunately it looks like the consumer website no longer exists (thanks to pathensley for making me aware of this originally). At first I thought that this meant that any credits you had with the company were lost, but this is not the case according to Miles to Memories. You can still make bookings using your consumer credits, but you’ll need to make a business account (this requires phone verification) and then send an e-mail to [email protected] to complete your booking. You can also call them directly to have them search for you. I’d strongly recommend reading Miles to Memories for more details on this process.
In slightly more alarming news when I tried to log into their business site with my consumer username and password, it didn’t work and then both my username and password were shown in plain text in the URL field – not the best security especially if you want to capture the lucrative business market.
It’d be nice if Hotel Engine actually communicated these changes to their consumer customers and didn’t make it so difficult to use unused credits. Even allowing us to search without an account would be fantastic. I actually have $800 in Hotel Engine credit (all from referrals, by far the most I’ve ever earned from a referral link – mostly because our original post actually appears in the search engines for “Hotel Engine).
Because I don’t want $800 sitting in an account I can no longer view long term and I don’t have any US travel plans in the near future, I’m going to give away that $800 in Hotel Engine credit. I’ll be announcing that contest soon, in the mean time follow me on Twitter so you don’t miss it.
