Tips For Saving On Your Hotel Room in New York City

By Pauline Frommer

In the hotel listings, I’ve tried to give you an idea of the kind of deals that may be available at particular hotels. But there’s no way of knowing what the offers will be when you’re booking, so also consider these general tips:

• Choose your season carefully. Room rates can vary dramatically—by hundreds of dollars in some cases—depending on what time of year you visit. Winter, from January 4 through mid-March, is best for bargains, with summer (especially July–August) second best. Fall is the busiest and most expensive season after Christmas, but November tends to be quiet and rather affordable, as long as you’re not booking a parade-route hotel on Thanksgiving weekend. All bets are off at Christmastime, New Year's, and the weekend of the NYC marathon—expect to pay top dollar then
• Bizarrely enough, when the city fills up, lesser quality hotels will often charge prices that are equal to or even higher than the luxury hotels. It makes no sense, but it happens quite often. So it’s important to NEVER try and assess the quality of a hotel by the price it’s asking. Instead, read the reviews carefully and compare the prices you’re being quoted to make sure you’re not getting taken.
• Go uptown, downtown, or to an outer borough. The advantages of a Midtown location are overrated, especially when saving money is your object. The subway can whisk you anywhere you want to go in minutes; even if you stay on the Upper West Side, you can be at the ferry launch for the Statue of Liberty in about a half-hour. You’ll not only get the best value for your money by staying outside the Theater District, in the residential neighborhoods where real New Yorkers live, but you’ll have a better overall experience: You won’t constantly be fighting crowds, you’ll have terrific restaurants nearby, and you’ll see what life in the city is really like. Lodgings in Brooklyn and Queens offer particularly good savings. We also have a handful of suggested hotels in New Jersey on this site, all of which are accessible by lightening fast public transportation.
• Shop online. There are so many ways to save online and through apps, I've devoted several paragraphs to the topic (see below this bulleted list).
• Choose a chain. With some exceptions, I have not reviewed mass-volume chain hotels on this website. In my opinion, they tend to lack the character and local feel that most independently-run hotels have. And it’s that feel, I believe, that is so much a part of the travel experience. Still, when you’re looking for a deal, they can be a good option. Most hotels—particularly such chains as Comfort Inn and Best Western—are market-sensitive. Because they hate to see rooms sit empty, they’ll often negotiate good rates at the last minute and in slow seasons. You can also pull out all the stops for discounts at a budget chain, from reward points to senior status to corporate rates. Most chain hotels let the kids stay with parents for free. Ask for every kind of discount; if you get an unhelpful reservation agent, call back. Of course, there’s no guarantee.
• Avoid excess charges and hidden costs. Don’t be tempted by minibar offerings: Most hotels charge through the nose for water, soda, and snacks. Also: ask about resort fees and service charges, which can increase the cost of a room by 15 percent or more. If a hotel insists on charging an “energy surcharge” that wasn’t mentioned at check-in, you can often make a case for getting it removed. That's especially true now that Mayor Mamdani has made it illegal for hotels to charge these types of "junk fees".
• Make multiple reservations. This strategy can save you money. As the date of the stay approaches, hotels start to play “chicken” with one another, dropping the price a bit one day to try and lure customers away from a nearby competitor. Making this strategy work takes vigilance and persistence, but since your credit card usually won’t be charged until 24-hours before check-in, little risk is involved. We've found that last minute savings are better than the discounts offered for locking down a non-refundable reservation in advance.
• Consider Alternate Accommodations to Hotels. For more on that, click here. Alas: we don't mean short term apartment rentals, as those are illegal in NYC.

Turning to the Internet or Apps for a Hotel Discount

Before going online, it’s important that you know what "flavor" of discount you’re seeking. Currently, there are four types of online reductions:

1. Extreme discounts on sites where you bid for lodgings without knowing which hotel you’ll get. You’ll find these on such sites as Priceline.com and Hotwire.com, and they can be money-savers, particularly if you’re booking within a week of travel (that’s when the hotels resort to deep discounts to get beds filled). As these companies use only major chains, you can rest assured that you won’t be put up in a dump. For more reassurance, use the browser extensions Travel Arrow, Room Revealer and Express Guess. They use a variety of methods to suss out which  'secret'  hotel is being offered.
2. Discounts on chain hotel websites. Not long ago, all of the major chains announced they’d be reserving special discounts for travelers who booked directly through the hotels’ websites (usually in the portion of the site reserved for loyalty members). They weren’t lying: these are always the lowest rates at the hotels in question, though discounts can range widely, from as little as $1 to as much as $50. Our advice: search for a hotel that’s in your price range and ideal location (see below for where to do that) and then, if it is a chain property, book directly through the online loyalty portal.
3. Use the right hotel search engine. They’re not all equal, as we at Frommers.com learned after putting the top 20 sites to the test in 20 cities (including NYC) around the globe. We discovered that Trivago.com  listed the lowest rates for hotels in the city center, and in the under $200 range, 16 out of 20 times—the best record, by far, of all the sites we tested. We also test AI chatbots, and they bombed, coming up with the lowest prices 0% of the time.
4. Last-minute discounts. Booking last minute can be a great savings strategy, as prices sometimes drop in the week before travel as hoteliers scramble to fill their rooms. But you won’t necessarily find the best savings through companies that claim to specialize in last-minute bookings. Instead, simply turn to Trivago (see item #3 on this list).
5. Consider joining a hotel discount club. Travel & Leisure has one, as do many trade unions. Members must pay an annual fee, so this only works for those who travel frequently. But if that's you, you may be able to save a bunch this way, especially on higher end hotels.

What I’ve just discussed involves a lot of surfing, I know, but in the hothouse world of Big Apple hotel pricing, this sort of diligence can pay off.