How likely is a price drop after booking?

57% of the stays we tracked dipped at least 5% below their starting price at some point, and 41% dipped at least 10%. 21% never went below the starting price. Most dips were temporary.

Do hotel prices get cheaper closer to check-in?

Not reliably. At the most recent check, 55% of stays were above their starting price and 41% below, and 75% rose at least 5% at some point.

What should I do if my hotel gets cheaper after I book?

If your booking has free cancellation, cancel and rebook at the lower price before the deadline. If the lower price is on another site, check whether your booking site's best price guarantee covers the difference.

How can I track my hotel price after booking?

Register the hotel and dates at hotelrefund.net/track. It is free with no signup; we check the price several times a day and keep every observation on a public page.

How Often Do Hotel Prices Change After You Book? Our Data

Q: How often do hotel prices change after you book?

In our records of 56 stays tracked for a median of 39 days, the Agoda price changed a median of 37 times per stay — roughly 7 to 8 times a week.

Instead of quoting someone else's survey, we looked at our own records: 6,392 price checks across 56 hotel stays, each watched from the day someone started tracking it.

What we measured

Every tracking on HotelRefund is one hotel and one set of dates, checked from the day someone registers it. We read the Agoda price several times a day — the total for the whole stay, taxes and fees included, for 2 adults — and keep every observation.

For this article we took every public tracking with at least a week of history: 56 stays, 6,392 price checks, a median of 39 days of history each. 13 of them have already reached their check-in date. "Starting price" below means the first price we recorded, which is usually around the time the person booked or began comparing.

How often the price changed

A lot. The median stay saw its price change 37 times — roughly 7 to 8 changes a week. If you checked once on the day you booked and never looked again, you missed nearly all of those moves.

How far below the starting price it went

57% of stays dipped at least 5% below their starting price at some point
41% dipped at least 10% below
27% dipped at least 15% below
21% never went below the starting price at all

For the median stay, the best moment was 7.7% below where it started. On a $600 stay that is about $46 — the kind of gap a free-cancellation rebook or a price-match claim can recover. Most of these dips did not last: a price that is 10% lower on Tuesday can be back up by Friday.

It goes up just as often

75% of stays rose at least 5% above their starting price at some point
61% rose at least 10% above
39% did both — dipped 5% below and rose 5% above — within the same tracking period

At the most recent check, 55% of stays were priced higher than when tracking began and 41% lower. "Wait and it will get cheaper" is not a safe rule. Neither is "book early and you always pay less." The price wanders in both directions.

What this means once you have booked

Prefer a refundable rate when the premium is small. It lets you act on a dip: cancel and rebook before the free-cancellation deadline. A non-refundable booking cannot do that, though a few options still remain.
Keep watching after you book. Dips are short, so something has to check for you. That is what the price tracker does.
If the lower price is on another site, your booking site's best price guarantee may pay the difference — see how to claim it.
Do not count on last-minute prices. More of these stays ended higher than lower.

If the price looks different every time you refresh the page, that is a separate effect — see why hotel prices change when you refresh.

Limits of this data

One source: Agoda's standard rate as shared with partners. Member, app-only, coupon and non-refundable rates are not included, and other sites move differently.
Mostly Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia, where most of our users travel.
The stays were chosen by our users, not sampled at random. 56 is a small number — read the percentages as a rough picture, not a forecast for your hotel.
The starting price is the first price we recorded, not necessarily what the person paid.

Every stay counted here is public. You can browse the tracked hotels and open the full price history of each one.

How Often Do Hotel Prices Change After You Book? Data From 56 Tracked Stays