Our Average Member saves €825 (£650) per annum

What does our "average" client save?

Of course this is hard to say as all of our clients are, of course, individuals. But our booking systems are efficient and we can say!

We have clients who travel regularly to South Africa, clients who travel regularly to Asia, clients who travel within the UK and Ireland. Some who travel weekly and some who travel monthly and some who travel only occasionally.

Variety is the spice of life!

We monitor our client savings on a daily basis and for the first two months of this year, our bookings into our contracted hotels have saved our clients of €58 per night when compared to the best Internet prices.

Sometimes we save more, sometimes we save less but an average saving of €58 per night.

But we decided to expand a little more on our "average member" and if our "average member" booked 12 nights per year with us (and got the average discount just 80% of the time - conservative is our middle name), rented a car twice per year for 4 days, stayed in a holiday home for 5 days and used our fuel discount occasionally and used the Gatwick and Heathrow express once - our average member would save:

€825 (£651) per annum

Now that's not bad for an annual membership fee of just €169 (£119).

Spend €169(£119) and save €825 (£651) and benefit additionally from

• payment on check out not upfront - travel plans change, no problem, cancel without penalty


• the time saving convenience of our full free booking service - no more hours spent trawling the internet searching for those elusive great deals!


• all our additional fantastic extra member benefits

If you would like to be our "average member" and save €825 (£651) and also save lots of time these year why not contact us. Send us an e mail or give us a call on +353 1 2130729.

But don't worry nobody is average in our eyes - try us and see.

We would love to hear from you and if you contact us we'll be delighted to send you an online copy of our guide to finding the cheapest flights. We might just save you money on your flights as well!

Related stories:

Testimonials and other good stuff

Some recent member's savings

VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol)

We use VOIP (voice over internet protocol) extensively in our office. For those of you not in the know this basically means using the internet for your phone calls rather than traditional phone lines and at a considerable saving on the "normal cost" of traditional phonecalls.

You can use VOIP in a number of ways:

1. Using a VoIP telephone
2. Using a "normal" telephone with a VoIP adapter
3. Using a computer with speakers and a microphone

Here in the office our experience with VOIP has been largely positive. It is vastly cheaper than using normal phone lines especially for long distance calls. Indeed with many of the providers a number of long distance locations are actually free.

Quality of the line can be variable and because of that we use three different providers: Skype, VOIPbuster and Blueface. We have found that when sound quality on one provider is poor on a particular day we just switch to one of the other providers. Skype in our experience is the most expensive of these three providers. We use these on a "pay as you go basis" and each charges a per minute fee to various destinations. As I mentioned they provide free calls to some locations. If you were very clever you could only use each provider for locations to which their calls are free.

The bottom line is that we use VOIP extensively for our Hotel Bookings to overseas locations and our normal phone lines for local calls and to speak with clients.

I came across a company Vonage in the UK the other day. I had not heard of them before (perhaps I have been living in a cave!). The reason they stood out to me is that they offer a number of set price packages i.e. all calls to certain locations are "free" for a set monthly rate. So you can spend hours on the phone and know that at the end of the month your charge is the same.

Their packages start at £5.99 per month (it rises to £7.99 after 6 months - they'll get you eventually!) for unlimited calls to the UK and Ireland. Their top plan costs £18.99 per month for unlimited free calls to 45 countries worldwide. You need some equipment (a box between your computer and your phone) and these cost from Free to £9.99. These are their home user rates and they offer business packages as well. What caught my attention was the low monthly cost. As with all these things of course there is a catch - a 12 month contract and you don't know how well it's going to work on your broadband connection until you try it (Hobsons choice!).

As I hadn't heard of them before I had a quick scoot around the internet and found plenty of positive words e.g. Review Centre, Mybroadband. There are some negative as well e.g. SMStextnews. Mainly positive reviews from what I see.

With any of these VOIP services the quality of your calls - sound quality, interference, delay etc. is definitely related to the quality of your broadband connection. So if your still on dial up or your broadband is slow VOIP is definitely not for you.

However, if you need to make extensive long distance phone calls VOIP is certainly worth considering. Untill the quality is consistently perfect (which in my experience it isn't) I am inclined to hold on to my landlines as well. As we say in Ireland "just to be sure to be sure"

Related (vaguely related only) articles:

Maxroam further improves - now you can roam for free

Need a Wi-Fi Hotspot

Maxroam reduces your roaming charges when travelling

Here at Hotel Express we are all about saving our clients money on their Hotel Expenses. Why not have a look at our website and see how we work. If you are interested in reducing the money you spend on Hotels for your business travel and want to save the time you waste booking them why not e mail us.

Blatant Self Promotion!

OK this is blatant self promotion!

But in our defense we need new clients to continue to expand and grow our business - so please forgive the self adulation. We are proud of the job we do for our clients and Hotel Express saves our clients lots and lots of money on their Hotel Reservations. Below are some of the savings some of our clients have recently made.

Ref.	Hotel	Date	Nights	Room	Internet	Our Rate	Saving	Cur
320	St. James & Albany Paris	4/2/08	3	Suite	290	220	210	€
450	Radisson SAS Daugava	30/1/08	2	Sing. Bus Class	177	94	167	€
337	Commodore Hotel London	25/1/08	4	family	222	155	268	€
295	Hastings Culloden Belfast	12/01/08	1	fam. room	250	125	125	£
440	Commodore Hotel Rome	27/5/08	2	double	190	150	80	€
459	Rochestown Park Hotel	24/1/08	1	single	135	71	64	€
483	First Hotel Kolding Sweden	30/1/08	1	single	138	110	28	€
571	du Bois Hotel Paris	8/2/08	4	twin	207	116	366	€
593	Regina Hotel Vienna	18/4/08	3	superior twin	200	100	300	€
558	Park Inn Dundalk	1/2/08	2	twin	119	60	119	€
316	Crowne Plaza San Francisco A'pt	12/2/08	1	king club	209	80	129	US$
566	Norfolk Royale Bournemouth	15/3/08	2	triple	130	100	60	£

I have carried out blatant self promotion on this blog before and if you want to see more of it have a look at:

10% off best available online rates
Franchises Subdistributors etc.

It's not a lot really!

If you would like to see what Hotel Express can do for you why not contact us on +353 1 2130729 or send us an e mail We'll be delighted to speak with you and save your company money and time. You can concentrate on what you do best and earn money for yourself and your company and we do what we do best save you time and money!