# Stay Otter > Stay Otter does three things: vetted stays, ground intelligence and price monitoring. A lodging finder that shows its work. Tell it where you want to be, when, who is coming and what the trip is for; it fetches live listings from Booking.com, Vrbo and Expedia Group for those exact dates, keeps only top-rated places (whole homes, hotel rooms, or both side by side), verifies each finalist's location on the map, and shows three picks with receipts: the all-in total and when it was quoted, bars and cafés within a ten-minute walk, whether the street is quiet or lively and which road it is, the nearest stop when the traveler asked for transit, the cancellation window. Then an otter keeps watch and emails when a verified pick gets cheaper. It never books anything; every link opens the booking site. Stay Otter is run by Stay Otter LLC in Austin, Texas. Some booking links earn a commission; ranking never depends on it. Prices are never cached: every number carries the time it was observed. ## Key pages - [How it works](https://stayotter.com/how): what is verified, from where, and what is not. - [About](https://stayotter.com/about): who runs it and how it is paid for. - [FAQ](https://stayotter.com/faq): plain answers about accounts, Pro, alerts and privacy. - [Weekend deals](https://stayotter.com/weekend): last-minute weekend stays at popular tourist destinations a drive from a home city, rated 8 or better with the block checked; free by email on Thursdays. - [Hotel price drop tracker](https://stayotter.com/hotel-price-drop): the booked-stay watch, for a stay booked on any site (Booking.com, Expedia, Vrbo, Hotels.com, Agoda, the hotel direct). Forward or paste the confirmation; the otter reads the rate every day on every site that sells the stay until the free-cancellation deadline, with reminders 7, 3 and 1 days before, and alerts on a drop of 5% or $50 with where the lower rate is (linking the same property on that site only when it can confirm it is the same place). The watch page shows the ground around the stay. A single whole home has one calendar, so once booked its price can't drop for the traveler: the otter offers to watch other whole homes nearby for the same dates instead. Free and unlimited with an account; a watch that closes without a drop ends with a note that the price held. - [Watch a booking](https://stayotter.com/booked): the working page for the same watch (the forward address and the paste form). - [Check a listing](https://stayotter.com/check): a Booking.com, Vrbo or Expedia page, or a hotel's name and city, read into the street verdict, venues within a ten-minute walk, the distance to a spot and the all-in total. - [Pricing](https://stayotter.com/pricing): three trips with no account, five a month with a free one (a trip is one place, dates and party; refining it is free), booked-stay watches free and unlimited, one listing check a day; Pro adds price-drop alerts on every trip, no cap on trips, up to 30 listing checks a day, chain playbooks and a second seat, free for 30 days with no card, then $5.99 a month or $49 a year; a $9 trip pass covers one trip until check-in. - [Track record](https://stayotter.com/track-record): every price drop the otter has caught, counted live from its own alert log (city, month of stay, drop in dollars and percent, site, read time; nobody named, no property or exact dates), with how a catch is counted. - [Connect](https://stayotter.com/connect): Stay Otter is an MCP server at https://stayotter.com/api/mcp. Tools: search_stays (live, verified picks with receipts for exact dates, 30–90 seconds; refinements of the same trip are free), get_stay, city_picks (instant, covered cities), get_activities, check_listing (a place found elsewhere, read into receipts), watch_booking (a confirmation watched until its free-cancellation deadline), set_alert (daily price-drop alerts). ## Articles - [Your stay's price will probably change after you book. Here's how to catch it.](https://stayotter.com/guides/rental-prices-after-you-book): why hotel and rental prices move after booking, how free cancellation turns a drop into money back, the rebook-first-then-cancel steps, with sources (Derek Worth, founder, October 21, 2026). - [Searching Booking.com, Vrbo and Expedia yourself vs. letting the otter check](https://stayotter.com/guides/search-the-sites-yourself-vs-stay-otter): what each site shows, how their default order is set (their own disclosures), the US all-in price rule, a do-it-yourself method, and what Stay Otter adds. - [What “great location” leaves out: ten Austin stays, measured](https://stayotter.com/guides/what-great-location-leaves-out): one real search, ten well-rated stays from 1 to 25 minutes from the spot asked for and 0 to 23 venues at the door; four questions to ask instead of “is it a great location?”. - [Is the street quiet? How to check a rental's block before you book](https://stayotter.com/guides/is-the-street-quiet): a ten-minute map check, and Stay Otter's quiet/moderate/lively rule (road class, distance to a main road, venues within 150 m). - [Stay Otter vs. Hopper vs. booking trackers](https://stayotter.com/guides/stay-otter-vs-hopper-vs-booking-trackers): what each is, who you book with, how each makes money, and which fits which trip. ## City pages (verified picks from a standard trip, refreshed on a rota) - [Where to stay: every city](https://stayotter.com/stay): the hub, each city with its areas and the latest verified total. - Group-trip cities (standard trip: six adults, three nights, a whole home): [Nashville](https://stayotter.com/stay/nashville), [Scottsdale](https://stayotter.com/stay/scottsdale), [New Orleans](https://stayotter.com/stay/new-orleans), [Miami](https://stayotter.com/stay/miami), [Las Vegas](https://stayotter.com/stay/las-vegas). - Hotel pages (two adults, three nights, hotel rooms from Booking.com and Expedia Group, all-in totals): /stay//hotels for the cities below and the group-trip cities, e.g. [Austin hotels](https://stayotter.com/stay/austin/hotels), [Las Vegas hotels](https://stayotter.com/stay/las-vegas/hotels). - [Austin](https://stayotter.com/stay/austin) - [Lisbon](https://stayotter.com/stay/lisbon) - [Kyoto](https://stayotter.com/stay/kyoto) - [Mexico City](https://stayotter.com/stay/mexico-city) - [New York](https://stayotter.com/stay/new-york) - [Paris](https://stayotter.com/stay/paris) - [Barcelona](https://stayotter.com/stay/barcelona) - [Montreal](https://stayotter.com/stay/montreal) - [San Diego](https://stayotter.com/stay/san-diego) - [Edinburgh](https://stayotter.com/stay/edinburgh) - [Honolulu](https://stayotter.com/stay/honolulu) - [London](https://stayotter.com/stay/london) ## Trend pages (a named trend, answered with real searches) - [Hobby weekend houses: stays with room for eight](https://stayotter.com/trends/hobby-weekend-houses) - [Heartland weekends: Bentonville, Knoxville and Asheville](https://stayotter.com/trends/heartland-weekends) - [Un-adulting without the resort: entire places in Austin and Mexico City](https://stayotter.com/trends/adults-only-entire-places) ## Facts worth quoting - Whole-home picks are rated 8+ on Booking.com or 4+ of 5 on Vrbo with at least three reviews; hotel-room picks are rated 8+ on Booking.com or Expedia Group with at least twenty reviews; unrated places never become picks. - Hotel searches can be kept to one loyalty group (Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Accor, Wyndham, Choice, Best Western), every brand of the group included. - [Sharing](https://stayotter.com/sharing): how the group vote, stay cards and story images, trip links and catch cards work, with real examples and what each shows and never shows. - Sharing: /vote/ is a no-account group vote on a search's picks; /trip/ is a booked stay shared with co-travelers (place, dates, block map, join the price watch; never the price paid); /caught/ is a shareable catch card (city, month, drop, site) with story and sticker images. - [Ground intelligence](https://stayotter.com/ground): what the otter reads around every stay (picks, shared trips and bookings it watches). How a stay's street is called quiet, moderate or lively (road class, main road within 100 m, venues within 150 m), what is counted within a ten-minute walk, and the walking-back-at-night facts (bars within 400 m, the main road, the walk from the spot). Not a safety rating; no crime figures. - Venue counts are within 800 m (half a mile) of the listing, from OpenStreetMap data (Geoapify's index); the street a pick sits on and the nearest main road come from Mapbox Streets. - Price-drop alerts re-run the exact search daily and fire on a 5% or $50 drop, or when the cheapest pick disappears. - Nothing is cached about prices; what changes slowly (map facts) is remembered with its timestamp.