A New Way to Book Hotels — and Earn Cash Back

Saving money on travel expenses just became easier.

Ebates.com has introduced “Ebates Hotels.” This new feature enables you to search for, compare and book hotel rooms without leaving the Ebates website. It simplifies the process of earning cash back for your hotel stays.

As of Wednesday morning, Ebates Hotels was offering 7 percent cash back on all bookings. To check out the feature for yourself, visit Ebates’ website, enter “Ebates Hotels” in the search bar at the top of the page and click on the “Ebates Hotels” logo.

Ebates is a cash-back portal. That means that when you do your online shopping through its website, you earn rebates in the form of cash — commonly called “cash back.”

Usually, you visit Ebates’ site and then are redirected to the website where you want to shop. With Ebates Hotels, though, you can browse and book hotel rooms without needing to navigate any other websites.

Additionally, on Ebates Hotels, nightly room rates are listed with the expected amount of cash back already factored in — which Ebates calls “the After Cash Back Rate.” So it’s easy to determine how much a hotel stay will actually end up costing you after you receive the cash back.

More about Ebates and its competitors

Like other cash-back portals, Ebates receives a commission from retailers for referring online shoppers to those retailers’ websites. Then, Ebates shares that commission with shoppers. So your cash back is your share of that commission.

It’s free to sign up for an Ebates account, and it’s free to use the portal.

Ebates is among the oldest and best-known cash-back portals, but it’s not the only one. It’s not the only portal that offers rebates on travel reservations, either.

Other portals include Mr. Rebates, Swagbucks Shop and TopCashBack — all of which offer cash back on online travel purchases like hotel stays.

So even if you already have an Ebates account, you might want to check out other cash-back portals to find the best deal for a given merchant.

For example, I now use both Ebates and TopCashBack. I have used Ebates for more than five years but recently joined TopCashBack after researching it and finding that — at least for the online retailers that I frequent– TopCashBack often offers more cash back than Ebates.

To learn more about how these cash-back portals differ, check out my side-by-side comparison in “4 Websites That Pay You to Go Shopping.”

Do you use cash-back portals? Let us know which is your favorite and why. Comment below or over on our Facebook page.