How to find corporate codes to get hotel corporate rates?

There are two ways to book a room enjoying a corporate rate: calling the hotel and asking for the rate or booking on the hotel website using the corporate or contract code. Calling the hotel is not always successful because sometimes the reservation agent of the hotel will ask for an email from a corporate email account in order to confirm the booking. Therefore in case you are eligible for the rate as a contractor, supplier or customer but you are not an actual employee, you will not be able to complete the booking. The solution is to ask your contact at your client or supplier to book the room for you.

The more convenient way to book the room is using the corporate code and going directly to the hotel website providing the code during the reservation. There is usually a field called "Corporate Code", or "Corporate Contract" or "Discount Code". The issue is clearly getting access to the corporate code because very often not even employees know the corporate discount code to get access to the discounts. It is typically a information in the hands of the travel department. However, once you know that you are eligible for a discount as an employee, contractor, supplier or client, you can just search for the corporate code on-line on Google.  There are many forums on-line where these codes are typically shared by people and Google will bring you right there. For example, if I am going to visit XYZ Corporation and therefore I expect to be eligible to use their corporate rates, I search on-line “XYZ Corporation hotel corporate rate code”, or “XYZ corporate rate HOTEL_NAME” where HOTEL_NAME is the hotel or the chain I’d like to stay at. One of the best forum to find the codes is Flyertalk (www.flyertalk.com). However, codes are easier to be found with Google that browsing the forum manually.

Clearly large corporate and large hotel chains are the best candidates to find codes. I would not waste my time if I were visiting a customer who was a mid-sized corporation. Very unlikely mid-sized companies have chain-wide agreement with hotel chains. Because my career is in technology I typically visit companies such as Intel, Google, HP, Microsoft, Siemens, IBM, Oracle, Accenture, Dell, General Electric (GE), Honeywell or Cisco. All these large corporations are very good negotiators of corporate rates and they typically have deals with most of the largest chains such as Hilton, Starwood (Westin, Sheraton, Four Points, W), Club Carlson (Radisson, Park Plaza), Marriott and Hyatt.