Here are two ways to book a room enjoying a corporate rate:
1. Call the hotel and ask for a rate or use the company code or contract code to make a reservation on the hotel’s website. Calling the hotel is not always successful because sometimes the hotel reservationist will request an email from the company’s email account to confirm the reservation. Therefore, if you are eligible for the rate as a contractor, vendor or customer, but you are not an actual employee, you will not be able to complete the reservation. The solution is to ask your client or supplier’s contact to book the room for you.
2. A more convenient way to book a room is to use a corporate code and provide the code directly to the hotel website at the time of booking. There is usually a field called “Corporate Code”, or “Corporate Contract” or “Discount Code”. The problem is obviously how to get the corporate code, because many times even the employees don’t know the corporate discount code in order to get the discount. It is usually information that is in the hands of the travel department. However, once you know that you are eligible for a discount as an employee, contractor, supplier or customer, you can Google for a corporate code. There are many forums online where these codes are usually shared by people and Google will take you there. For example, if I will be visiting Company XYZ and therefore I want to qualify for their corporate rates, I search online for “Company XYZ hotel corporate rate code”, or “XYZ corporate rate HOTEL_NAME”, with HOTEL_NAME being the hotel or chain I want to stay at. One of the best sites to find codes is Hotel Corporate Codes . However, finding codes with Google is much easier than manually browsing the forums.
Obviously, large corporations and large hotel chains are the best candidates for finding codes. I would not waste my time if the client I was visiting was a medium-sized business. It is very unlikely that a medium-sized company would have a chain agreement with a hotel chain. Because my career is in technology, the companies I usually visit include Intel, Google, HP, Microsoft, Siemens, IBM, Oracle, Accenture, Dell, General Electric (GE), Honeywell, or Cisco. All of these large companies are very good corporate price negotiators and they usually have deals with most of the largest hotel chains such as Hilton, Starwood (Westin, Sheraton, Four Points, W), Carlson Club (Radisson, Park Plaza), Marriott and Hyatt.
