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A Luxury Hotel Rate Guarantee: Raffles Stands Alone?

[Ed. Note: Hotel Deal Maven Tim Leffel investigates a luxury hotel's best rate guaranteed offer.]

Will others follow Raffles' best rate guarantee on their web site? Or is wheeling and dealing too gauche for the upper crust clientele?

While many international hotel chains have touted "best rate" guarantees for years, it has been a different story at the luxury end of the scale. Maybe it's the "if you have to ask" mentality. Maybe it stems from a desire to maintain some control over who gets the best deals. Regardless, we have rarely seen any kind of guarantee at the top end until we ran across this one on the Raffles site.

It basically says that if you find a lower published rate on another web site, for the exact same room type and dates, they'll reimburse the difference and give you a 50% discount on top of it. Pretty sweet, in theory anyway.

As noted in a column in SmarterTravel, however, these guarantees are never quite as good as they sound. The fine print always has a long list of conditions, forms you have to fill out exactly right, and a time limit of just 24 hours from making the booking. "Clearly, your chances are pretty slim of finding a lower room rate that gets through all of those exclusions. And that's the whole idea," the article says. "Such guarantees don't promise that you won't find any lower prices, no matter where you look; they just promise that you won't find any qualifying lower prices, and they decide what qualifies."

At the high-end hotels, however, there's at least the chance that their superior customer service will come into play and a loyal customer will catch a break. But do any of the others offer a guarantee? We can't find one listed at Peninsula, Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, Orient-Express, Fairmont, or Oberoi.

Interestingly enough though, Expedia has a rate guarantee for all of them. So the best strategy might be to book there first, find a better rate direct, then argue with Expedia to get your rate guarantee bonus. Just spend plenty of time poring over the conditions before entering the credit card info.

Related Stories:
· Ed Perkins on Travel [SmarterTravel]
· Raffles L'ermitage Beverly Hills reviews [TripAdvisor]