[lmm]

> 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.

[climb_stealth]

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.

[lmm]

> 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.

[climb_stealth]

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.