I book with hotels directly almost all the time and never receive marketing spam just regular mail about my upcoming start. Also booking with the hotel lets me select options not available on booking sites like king vs 2 queen bed options, ADA compliant rooms and even floor options. Also if you have AAA or some other memberships, those codes can easily beat discount sites like Booking.com

> I book with hotels directly almost all the time and never receive marketing spam just regular mail about my upcoming start.

What's your secret? Even the hotel in privacy-conscious Austria I stayed with once four years ago spams me.

> booking with the hotel lets me select options not available on booking sites like king vs 2 queen bed options, ADA compliant rooms and even floor options

If their booking system works. Usually faster and more reliable to send a message on booking.com.

> if you have AAA or some other memberships, those codes can easily beat discount sites like Booking.com

Maybe if your time is worthless.

Not much of a secret, but clicking the unsubscribe links in emails helps. Anything new I sign up to I'm pretty religious about it. Some new email I didn't ask for -> instant unsubscribe. Works way better than one might expect.

Very noticeable when using custom domain and emails where I might sign up to the same service several times.

> Not much of a secret, but clicking the unsubscribe links in emails helps. Anything new I sign up to I'm pretty religious about it. Some new email I didn't ask for -> instant unsubscribe. Works way better than one might expect.

I usually do that and it works for a lot of things, but small hotels are one of the things that seems to slip through. And even when it works, I still resent having to do it at all, and would rather book via a big aggregator where I've already done the unsubscribe years ago.

Yep, fair enough. You are right, funnily enough it's small businesses who are the worst with this. The big ones spam a lot if you let them, but they do tend to respect the unsubscribe.

In these cases they get a dedicated email rule and anything they send goes straight to the bin.

A lot of hotels allows you to book room without creating an account and I don't remember receiving spam from those I visited. It would only make sense for chains which have a foot in every major city.