One of the unique angle our blog has is offers and tools specific to the Chinese market, which can be very useful but little known to the West. Badazhou, a travel agency with access to many preferred partner rates, is one of the examples.
We will be talking about another Wechat mini-program today, so first of all you need a Wechat account to use it. It is developed by a friend of mine and called 早早的快乐旅程 – or Zaozao’s Happy Journey in English – Zaozao is the pet name of his daughter 🙂
You can find the mini-program by searching 早早 in Wechat.
The application has quite a few features now, but the fundamental and most important one is to find award / free night availability and pricing, in an extended calendar view, of many hotels.
- It currently supports all major hotel chains, including but not limited to Hilton, Marriott, IHG and Hyatt
- Although it has a geographic focus in China, many hotels in major foreign countries / cities are also being continuously added to the system
Once you are in the application, simply enter the hotel’s name or location in English and click 搜索 / Search.
There is a brand filter just below the search bar, from left to right: IHG, Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, Accor, Shangri-la, Wyndham and All. To avoid confusion I suggest leave the selection at 所有 / All to make sure you see the desired hotels.
Click through any hotel to see availability in the calendar view.
You can switch between different rate types in the top section. But usually we are only interested in point redemption so you shouldn’t need to touch anything. Another good use case is for the BOGO rate of InterContinental Ambassador.
You can easily see how many points an award night costs on any day. If it’s blank then that day was unavailable when Zaozao last checked.
If you click on any date, you can also add an alert by clicking the left button 添加监控:
Enter your date next to the third row 监控日期, and set the alert threshold if applicable, before clicking the green button.
When award night becomes available (or the price drops below your set threshold), you will receive an alert in Wechat. To ensure fairness one alert covers one day only, so you’ll need multiple alerts if staying more than one night.
The tool is extremely useful. It has helped me on a few occasions in the past, as well as many others. In fact it is probably the most visited tool in the frequent traveller world in China. It is also completely free, and there’s currently no plan to change that.
I asked my friend and he’s more than happy for me to share this information on this English blog. Although the application is Chinese, using its basic feature should be quite straightforward if you follow my instructions above.
Please ask your friend to create an English version. I would be willing to pay for access after trial period if it’s as good as you describe.
I will pass the message!