What do hotel discounts and cloud storage have in common? Apparently, Google.
When Google launched ‘Google One’, the subscription cloud storage membership for photo and video heavy users, the new program somewhat oddly received an outsized amount of coverage from the travel world.
Why? The ‘Google One’ subscription – of all things – touted hotel discounts, and after quite a while wondering if they were ever going to become a real “thing”, I’m now seeing them.
Google One Hotel Discounts
As an avid Google Pixel fan and photo heavy consumer, Google’s $1.99 a month cloud storage plan finally made sense for me this year. I’d gone plenty long, happily getting by without it, but I finally had enough travel memories documented on my phone to fill a cloud.
And really, that’s the only reason I subscribed. Certainly not for hotel discounts.
Honestly, after never really seeing any coverage of notable hotel discounts coming to fruition, I just kinda figured that the concept fizzled as Google focused on the core of the ‘One’ product. But over the last few months, I’ve seen select online travel agencies, commonly known as OTA’s, offering Google One member pricing on hotel stays.
Unsurprisingly, it seems to be the most “mobile forward” of the online travel booking companies which are pushing the special Google One pricing drive, and the timing makes sense too.
TripAdvisor just recently launched its “Plus” subscription, which for $99 a year promises significant discounts on hotels, and perhaps motivated Google to push the semi tangental Google One subscription.
Snaptravel is one such online travel agency, which seems keen to offer tasty discounts for Google One members. The outfit has a more contemporary approach than most. To go forward with making a booking, Snaptravel uses Facebook Messenger or a text message to stay in touch, and send customers onto the booking window from there.
With nearly $40 of savings on a one night stay, from a service which people mainly use for $1.99, for the cloud storage, it’s pretty cool! Searching thousands of nights across a variety of cities, I’m absolutely seeing more hotels or online booking methods with the coveted “1 member price” as shown above. Naturally, your next question is how?
Finding hotel discounts for ‘Google One’ members isn’t seamless, but it shouldn’t be too hard, either. Start with Google Hotels. Once there, select “more filters”. Once you have that done, you can click “One member prices” and you’ll see a list (if any) hotels are offering special deals for Google One.
Again, if they were always there – it would be seamless. They are not. Until then, it’s a bit hit and miss, but very encouraging to see that real deals do exist in the wild.
As TripAdvisor and others seek to tighten their grips on travel with their subscription models, Google may turn the might of their humble Google One plan towards travel more and more. I doubt anyone would mind if they took a similar concept to flights!
Should the need ever arise, good luck getting your photos off Google Drive in a hurry. One has to request ‘permission’ for Google to allow you to download your own photos in bulk and wait for them to send you a link. This obviously requires a working internet connection, which isn’t a given, so I’m sticking to backed up hard drives!
These discounts and even the search tools have disappeared. Has Google discontinued the discounts? Even the Google 1 search filter is missing. I was able to book several great deal this summer but now it’s like the program doesn’t even exist.
I found this page wondering the same thing. I got some stellar deals last year too. Better than half off in at least one case I can think of…but now it seems to be gone. Maybe we used it too much last year and they were losing too much money!