Some good discounts on flexible rates at Delaware North properties
/For those unfamiliar, Delaware North is a concessionaire that operates hotels, restaurants, and campsites at many parks and forests in the United States. They don’t offer their own loyalty program or co-branded credit card, and their locations show up in some, but not all travel booking portals: for one property I checked, a limited room selection was available through Chase’s Ultimate Rewards travel portal and Hotels.com, but not through US Bank’s travel portal or Priceline.com.
That means for access to the complete inventory of rooms, you’ll probably need to pay cash through Delaware North’s own booking engine (and then ideally redeem credit card points like Barclay Arrival+ Miles or Capital One Venture Miles against the purchase), and it also means it’s one of the rare occasions when discount codes can actually reduce your out-of-pocket expenses.
Use code “MYESCAPE” for a 20% discount on flexible rates at Delaware North properties
I found out about this offer because we got on a mailing list after staying at the Big Meadows Lodge at Shenandoah National Park last fall (subscribers can listen to my partner and I reflecting on the trip on episode 10 of The Manifesto podcast on the Milenomics Podcast Network).
Like any hospitality company, Delaware North is constantly running offers like discounted rates for AAA members (10%), senior rates (10%), military rates (20%), and advance purchase rates (25%).
Even more importantly, those rates are available throughout the season, including on weekends, so you may have no choice but to use one of those rates if you want to stay on Friday or Saturday between June and August.
Having said that, the “MYESCAPE” offer is pretty good, if you’re able to use it. A 20% discount off the best available rate is as good as the military discount, but with a more generous, no-fee change and cancellation policy up to 48 hours before arrival. The other discounted rates charge a $15 cancellation fee up to 72 hours before arrival, and the cheapest advance purchase rates cannot be changed or cancelled at all.
In other words, if you’re planning an eligible trip at an eligible property, the “MYESCAPE” code offers a pretty good discount and a lot of flexibility should your plans change.
Different properties have different blackout dates (and rooms are going fast)
There are two things to be aware of here. First, the booking engine varies slightly between different properties: some use three different fields for “Group Code,” “Promo/Corporate Code” and “Travel Industry ID,” and some use a drop-down menu. Not realizing this, at first I thought the “MYESCAPE” code didn’t work at “drop-down” properties.
But it does! You just have to be sure to select “Promo” as the code type when beginning your search.
Second, while the “MYESCAPE” e-mail I received specified only Fridays and Saturdays between July and August were blackout dates (and indeed I could find availability throughout the season between Sunday and Thursday), the promo code doesn’t work the same at all Delaware North properties.
In Yellowstone it works throughout June (including weekends), then availability completely disappears. It also doesn’t work at the Holiday Inn or Choice Hotel properties there.
The Tenaya Lodge at Yosemite has wide open availability in June, July and August, except over the July 4 weekend.
At the Peaks of Otter Lodge it works in May and June, but there’s no weekend availability at all.
At The Gideon Putnam there’s some weekend availability in June, before weekends are blacked out for July and August.
The Honey Creek Resort has a minimum stay requirement over the weekend of July 4.
The Lodge at Geneva has no Saturday availability at all, while Friday nights are available throughout the season.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the code to work at any of Delaware North’s properties outside the United States, in Australia and New Zealand.
Conclusion
While room availability under this promotion is limited at many properties after May or June, if you squint just right there’s a certain logic to it, since they are advertising it as an opportunity to “use your saved up vacation time.” Many white collar workers really do have weeks and weeks of vacation time saved up from all the trips they weren’t able to take in the last 12 months, which means weekend and holiday blackout dates aren’t quite as annoying to plan around as they used to be, and will be again soon.
The added flexibility of a 48-hour, fee-free cancellation policy is likewise a nice nod to the fact that almost no one has any idea when they’ll be comfortable traveling again.
So if you live within driving distance of a Delaware North property in the United States, and prefer a room with running water over roughing it, it’s worth clicking around a little bit to see if you can find dates, locations, and prices that work for you. Shenandoah National Park is by far the closest Delaware North property to us, and has relatively few opportunities for indoor crowding, but I also might speculatively book a late June stay at the hotel-style Peaks of Otter Lodge, in the hopes that the vaccine rollout will have reached us by then.
