How to get £10 of free Booking.com hotel credit

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Booking.com seems to be giving away £10 of free credit towards a future hotel stay to anyone who uses its app.

I’m not sure where this offer originated or where it was originally promoted, but a reader forwarded it to me this morning and it does work OK. (Thanks Claire!)

This is how you get your £10 of Booking.com credit.

Step 1: Download the Booking.com app and log in, or create an account if you don’t have one

You need the app to do this. It doesn’t work via the desktop site.

Step 2: Search for hotels in a random city on a random future date

Step 3: On the results page, ‘like’ THREE hotels by clicking the heart in the top right corner

IMPORTANT: The currency of the voucher is linked to the hotels you like. Pick 3 UK hotels and you get £10. Pick 3 European hotels and you will get €10 which converts to £9. It is best to pick UK properties.

You can see the heart you need to click here:

Step 4: A message will pop up to say that you have earned a £10 credit

Step 5: After a few minutes, go to your Booking.com wallet and you will see the £10 there:

The expiry date is 18th August 2021 (note 2021, not 2020!).

How do you use your £10 Booking.com credit?

It is very straightforward.

You can redeem your £10 credit via the Booking.com website if you wish – it isn’t necessary to use app if you find it too fiddly.

Once you have credit in your ‘wallet’, participating hotels show up as ‘Pay with Wallet’:

If you make a booking, the £10 is deducted at the final payment screen:

There’s one thing to remember though.

Any hotel rooms booked via Booking.com are treated as ‘third party bookings’. You won’t earn any loyalty points from the hotel and you won’t get any status benefits such as upgrades or free breakfast. Your £10 credit is therefore best used at independent hotels. It is also best used on cheap bookings where the £10 gets you a larger percentage saving.

For anything noticeably above £100 you’d be better off using Hotels.com Rewards, reviewed here, which gives you back 10% of what you spend in credit.

Hotel offers update – December 2021:

Want to earn more hotel points? Click here to see our complete list of promotions from the major hotel chains or use the ‘Hotel Offers’ link in the menu bar at the top of the page.

Want to buy hotel points? There is currently a special offer running with IHG Rewards (80% bonus to 4th January 2022) and World of Hyatt (30% discount, equivalent to a 43% bonus, to 30th December 2021).

Category

General

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

Peter Taysum says:

15 Jun15 June 20:32

Gif £10 credit, but looking for a hotel for five nights whilst building work taking place in my flat; hotels.com £100 cheaper…

May be helpful in the future,
Adam says:

15 Jun15 June 20:38

Worked for me, thanks.
Concerto says:

16 Jun16 June 09:03

Isn’t booking.com one of the ones that we should be boycotting? Coming out of Corona I don’t think we should be forgetting these companies that have behaved badly and, although I rarely use them, booking.com got a lot of bad press along the way.
- WaynedP says:
  
  16 Jun16 June 09:28
  
  I had four bookings totalling 7 nights with them when Covid-19 struck and I had no problem cancelling with out any cancellation fees.
  One booking was prepaid, which was promptly refunded once I established and followed the procedure for cancelling.
  I have no reason to boycott them.
- Peter Stewart says:
  
  16 Jun16 June 20:49
  
  I’ve not heard of any reason to boycott them. Do you have any sources to news articles etc. ?
  
  I’m all for looking into it, and supporting a boycott of any company that didn’t act in good faith during this time.
WaynedP says:

16 Jun16 June 09:38

Booking.com is my main hotel booking site.
I use it regularly and have earned “Genius Level 2” status, which I think is as high as it gets.
I’ve picked up a few pounds worth of credit along the way, mainly from leaving short survey responses on several past stays.
One limitation about having credit in your “wallet” is that it can only be applied when paying at time of booking. But that negates one of the main benefits of many of booking.com’s properties which is that you can book a reasonable “pay at the hotel” rate far in advance and cancel without any cost or fees, often up to 48 hours before arrival.
I use it to book holidays fairly far out in advance (before cheap flights are available) and just cancel at no cost if I don’t get a flight at my target price. But you can’t use the wallet credit when booking this way, so I already have several pounds worth of rolled over, unused credit.
Just something to consider.
abc says:

16 Jun16 June 10:32

This doesn’t work for me, even though, when I go to the list of favourites, the promotion is advertised.
- Leon says:
  
  16 Jun16 June 15:26
  
  Update to laresr version of the app. Once I did that it worked for me
Kevin says:

17 Jun17 June 21:30

Sorry could anyone shed a light where is the wallet being hiding within the app as I can’t see it.
- Rob says:
  
  18 Jun18 June 09:37
  
  Weirdly I couldn’t find it either. However if you go into the ‘bell’ notification icon at the top, and click the notification saying ‘Your £10 has been credited’, there is a link there to the wallet page.
  
  Alternatively, log in on desktop and it is clear.
Chris says:

18 Jun18 June 16:13

Worked for me.

A few things to note on Rob’s suggestion of using booking.com and hotels.com:
– hotels.com seems to be more expensive, I gather this is to cover the cost of the Hotels.com Rewards (10% of your spend back, i.e. one free night for every ten).
– Some hotels on booking.com include things like the “resort fee” or “property service charge” (some US hotels), while the same stay on hotels.com doesn’t. For example, a recent booking on booking.com was £1325 including the fee, and hotels.com was £1,682 PLUS the resort fee of £225!
– booking.com also has up to 15% off a stay when booked through their app, not the website.

I had a hotel in New York booked via booking.com. and had to have it cancelled because of Coronavirus. They refunded it within 2 days.
panka says:

25 Jun25 June 11:20

Got the credit, and used it for a booking, however, there’s one trick: credit is only applicable for pre-paid bookings. We booked on the day of travel, so it was not an issue, but this might be one if you want to cancel.