Hotel Mystery Shops

It's summer time again and time for me to catch up on some mystery shops. I love this time of year!! This is the great thing about a teacher schedule that makes all of the stress of beginning and end of the year worth it. So right to the good stuff now: I have come across an awesome site that lets you mystery shop hotels! I had known about hotel shops for a couple of years but had not had the opportunity to do one myself. Finally, last week I went out of town about four hours away from my house to Alabama. We had only planned to stay in a hotel for one night, so it occurred that we could stay for free instead of having to pay. You can't really beat that can you?

I read up on the requirements and signed up for the hotel shop. The payment will cover the cost of the room, and even pay $20. Woo hoo! Just like any other shop there are certain requirements. The actual requirements start with making the reservation and ends with check-out. The total time requirement to conduct the shop for me was about an hour I would guess. It took probably an additional hour to an hour and a half to complete the questionnaire about the shop. So for 2 1/2 hours of work, I got to stay in a hotel for free plus got $20.

Added bonus: The hotel also had breakfast. I guess it is called the continental breakfast- but don't quote me on that. It had the hot waffle maker, muffins, bagels, toast, cereal, juice, etc. Did I mention that at the service desk there were free cookies? I could hardly remember the things I needed to be observing when I saw those out of the corner of my eye. They were good too. mmm cookies. Oh, where was I? Ah yes, the hotel shop. We ended up checking in at around 8:00 p.m. and left at 7:45 a.m. Not requirements of the shop, we just hadda get a move on.

So check out hotel shops to get reimbursed for a mini vacay. From what I've seen you only get to stay one night per hotel, but what's to stop you from going from one hotel to another? In my opinion it's worth consideration. Say you take a little three night vacation in Orlando. You can get reservations at three different hotels for each night of your stay within a close proximity of each other. Here's a tip to get good hotels: before you sign up at a specific hotel do a search of that hotel on google or yahoo to see what past guests think about it. That way you don't end up at some roach motel in a bad neighborhood or something. Now for the link to the mystery shopping company that I used click here to fill out an application. Has anyone else ever done a hotel shop? What other companies are out there for hotel shops?