TripAdvisor's Tingo refunds if rates drop before your stay
— -- Tingo takes much of the tango out of the hotel-booking process, making the pursuit of a room discount a much less-complicated dance.
Smarter Travel Media, a unit of TripAdvisor, launched the service last month, with the name derived from a "T" for travel plus the "ingo" in bingo. Tingo's tagline is: "Take the gamble out of booking!"
Tingo claims to be the first site that allows travelers to book prepaid refundable hotel rooms, and if the rate drops, automatically cancels the reservation, rebooks the room each time the price falls and refunds the difference.
Tingo says it refunds guests' credit cards "within a few days of checkout."
Most of the more than 80,000 rooms worldwide displayed on Tingo.com, and through Expedia's affiliate network, where Tingo gets the rooms and rates, are prepaid and refundable.
Though many hotels offer prepaid refundable rates, some of their rooms may be refundable, while others may not.
Tingo is doing what travelers could do on their own. But with Tingo, they don't have to scour the fine print in hotels' cancellation policies, constantly check if the hotel lowered the rate, or wait until the last minute to make a reservation.
Tingo automatically does the work, enabling guests to book prepaid rooms up to months in advance, then sit back while Tingo monitors any rate drops and rebooks the same room type at the property up until the cancellation policy would otherwise kick in.
If for some reason the hotel increases the room rate, the reservation is locked in at the lower price.
"We work within the cancellation windows of the hotel," says David Krauter, Smarter Travel Media's manager.
Krauter adds that since the launch of Tingo, customers have been receiving average refunds of $35 for a two-night stay ($17.50 per night), although one guest at a hotel in Jackson, N.H., received $290 back on a $600 stay.
Tingo enables travelers to search for hotels — you know all the hotel details in advance — in three ways: Tingo recommendations; price; or Money Back hotels, those i that are refund-eligible.
Handy features include TripAdvisor ratings and guest reviews, as well as hotel- and traveler-submitted photos.
You can also search for other nearby Money Back hotels using Bing Maps.
Tingo is part of a website trend, which might be dubbed Hotel Booking 2.0. New sites, such as Tingo, BackBid and, to some extent, GuestMob, employ unorthodox models to empower travelers to save money.
Of note, Tingo is not the first site to offer refunds when hotel rates drop, as Orbitz Hotel Price Assurance made its debut in 2009. However, through Orbitz, another guest has to book the same itinerary at a lower rate to trigger the refund, and checks are mailed "in about six-eight weeks after your trip."
There are some cautions about Tingo, however.
•You probably won't receive the sometimes-steep discounts on sites such as Priceline and Hotwire, where you don't know the names of the hotel prior to booking.
The rates on Tingo are the same as on Expedia.com, and the base rates of the rooms, barring any special offers, should be comparable to those on the hotels' own sites.
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