Hotel rooms are like a night at the casino — the same thing can cost vastly different prices depending on your luck.
One website, however, is taking chance out of the equation by letting travelers know when hotels are most likely to surge their prices.
Offpeak.io is a website (currently in beta) that allows users to search travel dates and avoid peak hotel pricing. Culling information from city-wide events, historical weather patterns, and hotel room availability, Offpeak.io is able to show users which days and weeks hotels are most likely to have significant price changes.
One of the co-founders told Thrillist that the website was like “traffic data on your GPS,” but for hotel booking.
When searching for hotel rooms in New York City for September, for example, users will see that average nightly prices are cheapest toward the end of the month. In the middle of the month, visitors will have to contend with New York Fashion Week and the UN General Assembly, both of which push hotel room demand.
If users increase the search data to 11 months, it’s easy to see that the cheapest months to visit New York City are generally January and February.
As Offpeak.io continues to grow, it will continue to add more destinations for travelers to search. Because the website is still in a beta testing phase, users may experience a few bugs.
It’s not yet possible to book hotels through Offpeak.io (the website redirects users to Expedia), but it’s still a very useful research tool to help you plan a trip around the best hotel savings.