Tips for Booking Popular Hotels during College Football Weekends – NerdWallet

Heat up the grill and get your koozie ready — college football season is here. For out-of-town fans traveling to support their team, that fandom can be costly, with hotel room rates often seeing a dramatic increase in price during game day weekends. That increase can be even more extreme in smaller college towns with fewer hotels. But with a little planning, you can secure a room while keeping money in your pocket.

Here are five tips for scoring an in-demand hotel room during the college football season.

Most major hotel chains permit bookings between 350 and 395 days in advance. That means you can often book a game day weekend room for next season before the schedule is released (typically around January or February each year).

Don’t fret if the hotel you want gets instantly booked up. Cancellations happen, so keep checking if you don’t find immediate room availability. You can also call the hotel directly to see if they’ll add you to a waitlist.

Hotel prices generally increase in the time leading up to game day weekend, as less-well prepared fans jockey for any remaining rooms. If you know you’re attending a game before the season starts, booking in advance can not only secure a hard-to-find room but also save you money. This is even more important in smaller college towns that lack the hotel infrastructure of bigger cities. Lower supply and higher demand will make a game day room in Auburn, Alabama or Athens, Georgia harder to find than in a bigger city like Los Angeles, Seattle or Atlanta.

If you’re planning to attend a game next season, preemptively book a room when the schedule gets released at the beginning of the year. If the hotel permits free cancellations and doesn’t require a deposit or prepayment, you can preemptively book a room for each weekend around the time of the season you want to catch a game, then cancel the rooms that don’t work once the schedule is released.

Both local boutique and chain hotels often have stricter cancellation penalties during periods of peak demand, which may include issuance of partial refunds or requiring you to pay for at least one night for cancellation within a certain period before your stay. Be sure to confirm the cancellation policy with the hotel before you book.

Using hotel points during expensive weekends can be a great way to get outsized value from your rewards. This is especially true for loyalty programs with a fixed award chart (like Wyndham Rewards and World of Hyatt) and not dynamic pricing, where the number of points required is based on the cash rate of the room.

For example, a game day weekend room at the Hyatt Place in Gainesville, Florida to see the Florida Gators play can cost up to an outrageous $850 per night. The same room can be booked with 15,000 World of Hyatt points, resulting in a redemption value of 5.7 cents per point. That’s way above the valuation of 2.2 cents per point that NerdWallet assigns World of Hyatt points.