Search a hotel for five nights and you get one number. Search the same hotel for the first two nights and then the last three, and the two numbers added together are sometimes lower. Not by a rounding error. We regularly see gaps of 15% to 25% on the same room, in the same hotel, over the same dates.

Nothing shady is happening. It is a side effect of how hotel inventory is loaded, and once you understand the mechanism you can spot the stays where it is likely to work in about ten seconds.

Hotels do not price stays. They price nights.

A hotel does not have one price. It has a set of rate buckets for every individual night, each holding a limited number of rooms. Cheapest bucket sells first, then the next one, and so on up the ladder as the night fills.

When you request five consecutive nights, the booking engine has to find a single rate plan that is open on all five. If four nights have rooms in the cheap bucket and one night has sold out of it, the whole stay usually reprices to the higher bucket. Every night. Including the four that had cheap inventory sitting right there.

That one sold-out Saturday can add $40 a night to four nights that had nothing wrong with them.

What splitting actually does

Booking the stay as two separate reservations lets each one find its own cheapest available rate. The four good nights price at the cheap bucket. The busy Saturday prices at whatever it costs. You pay the real price of each night rather than the worst night’s price multiplied across the whole stay.

There is a second effect stacked on top. Hotels apply length-of-stay controls on high-demand dates, and one of the common ones is closed-to-arrival, which blocks new arrivals on a peak night to protect longer bookings. A stay that spans that night can get pushed into a more expensive rate plan entirely. Two shorter bookings sidestep the control because neither one spans it in the same way.

We wrote about the related version of this in why a hotel says it is sold out for one night but open for two. Splitting is the same lever pulled from the opposite direction.

When splitting is worth checking

It is not worth doing on every booking. Four situations account for almost all of the wins.

Your stay straddles a weekend. Friday and Saturday price on leisure demand. Monday to Thursday price on business demand. A Thursday to Monday stay is two completely different markets sharing one reservation, and the pricing engine resolves that badly more often than you would expect.

One night falls inside a city event. A conference, a match, a festival day. Event compression lifts a single date far above its neighbours, and a stay spanning it inherits the spike. We covered how event compression moves rates in more detail.

The stay is five nights or longer. More nights means more chances that one of them has run out of cheap inventory, and more nights for the penalty to be multiplied across.

The dates cross a month or season boundary. Seasonal rate calendars often change on the first of the month. A 28 September to 3 October stay is priced in two different seasons whether the booking engine handles that gracefully or not.

How to check it in under two minutes

Price the full stay first and write the total down. Then price the two halves separately, splitting at the boundary that looks most likely to be the problem. Weekend to weekday, or either side of the event date.

Add the two halves. If the split total is more than about 8% lower, it is worth the small hassle. If it is within a few percent, book the single reservation and move on.

Try one or two split points, not five. The gain almost always sits at the obvious boundary, and there is a real cost to spending twenty minutes optimising a $30 saving.

This is the part of the process where a price-first search saves the most time, because you are comparing totals rather than reading five different rate plans. At Best we surface the lowest available rate rather than the rate that pays us most, which makes this kind of comparison quick instead of tedious. The mechanism above works on any platform though. The maths does not care where you look it up.

The costs of splitting, honestly

This is not free money and there are four real downsides.

You may change rooms. Two reservations are two separate assignments in the property management system. Most hotels will keep you in the same room if you ask at check-in and they can, but on a full night they cannot. Budget for the possibility of moving your bags down a corridor mid-stay.

Two cancellation policies. The first booking might be free cancellation and the second non-refundable, or the deadlines may fall on different days. Read both. Our explainer on cancellation terms covers what to look for.

Package rates can break. If the cheap rate includes breakfast or parking, check that both halves include it. Splitting a stay onto two different rate plans occasionally means paying for breakfast on three nights and not the other two.

Fixed per-stay charges may double. Some properties levy cleaning or service charges per reservation rather than per night. Rare in hotels, common in apartment-style properties, and it can erase the whole saving.

Splitting across two hotels

The bigger version of this is moving hotels for the expensive night. On a citywide compression date, every property in the centre lifts together, but the effect thins fast as you move outward. Three nights in the centre and one night a couple of tram stops out can cut a total materially.

We would only do this when the single-night gap is large, something like $150 or more, because moving hotels costs an hour and some goodwill. For a business trip it is rarely worth it. For a longer leisure stay where the expensive night is the first or last one, it often is, since you are carrying bags that day anyway.

What about loyalty programmes

Night credits generally still count. Two reservations covering five nights normally earn five elite-qualifying nights, because the programmes count nights rather than reservations. Stay credits, which some programmes track separately for promotions, may count as two stays, which occasionally works in your favour.

The one thing worth doing is adding your membership number to both reservations before arrival, and mentioning at check-in that they are one continuous stay. Front desk staff can usually link them so that any elite benefits apply across the whole period.

Questions we get about split bookings

Is it cheaper to book two separate hotel reservations? Sometimes, and specifically when one night in the stay has sold out of its cheapest rate bucket or carries a length-of-stay restriction. On stays that straddle a weekend or an event date, splitting cuts 15% to 25% often enough to be worth a two-minute check.

Will the hotel make me change rooms? Possibly. Ask at check-in and most properties will keep you in the same room where inventory allows. On a sold-out night they may not be able to.

Does splitting break my loyalty status or points? No. Programmes count nights, so five nights across two reservations still earns five nights. Add your number to both bookings and ask the desk to link them.

Is this against hotel rules? No. You are making two ordinary reservations at the published price. Nothing is being circumvented and there is nothing to disclose.

How many nights before it is worth checking? Four or more, or any stay that includes a weekend or a known event date. Below that, the gap is usually too small to justify the second reservation.

Images: Hero by cottonbro studio via Pexels. Hotel reception via Pixabay. Hotel room by Lukas Rychvalsky via Pexels. Used under licence.