The geographical area where you want to stay. A metropolitan area is usually separated into differen

During the past few years, the topic of hotels has been discussed several times on Budgets Are Sexy. First, J asked whether or not he d be able to live in a hotel and provided several pros and cons of this type of living. Then, Fabulously Broke chimed in with a great guest post on her actual experiences living in a hotel, and how it fits her lifestyle as a freelance consultant, only to be outdone by a 71-year old describing why he feels hotel living is better than a nursing home (J$: True story! It s an awesome read :)) . Needless to say, there has been some interesting travel hawaii discussions!
As such, I thought it might be useful for everyone if I shared a strategy I have been using to land killer deals on quality hotel rooms. This strategy travel hawaii involves a combination of using both the Priceline Negotiator Name Your Price tool, and Hotwire.
I realize that many of you reading this have most likely already used Priceline or Hotwire (or both), and therefore are very familiar with how they work and the functionality offered. However, I wanted to briefly review them for a bit to ensure that everyone is indeed on the same page.
At a high level, Priceline s Name Your Price tool and the Hotwire site connects hotel room finders with nightly rates that are deeply discounted from the normal rates published travel hawaii by the same hotels. Hotwire/Priceline is able to offer these cheaper rates because these hotels contract the two companies to fill hotel vacancies that would otherwise go unsold. The benefit of obtaining these rates, however, can come at a cost depending on how specific your preferences for hotels are.
The geographical area where you want to stay. A metropolitan area is usually separated travel hawaii into different sections travel hawaii that are about 5 miles in diameter. You must choose one or more of these for where you want your hotel to be located. (Hint: By expanding the geographical search area, you can often find even better discounts off the hotel rooms)
As the name implies, Priceline s Name Your Price tool gives you the option to actually specify the price you d like to pay for a room. This is the main difference between Hotwire and the Priceline Negotiator. travel hawaii It s a truly genius idea on their part, since it engages customers more and empowers travel hawaii them with the ability to receive lower prices than Hotwire. For this reason, I like to make my final deals with Priceline s Name Your Price tool instead of Hotwire.
After electing a geographical sub-area, along with a hotel star class, Priceline then gives you the median retail price of the hotel rates in the specified category. Now maybe I m just overly skeptical, but I personally don t trust those quotes at all! I would much rather do my own research on what a good market price is, than take their word for it. Additionally, the whole point of using Priceline s Negotiator tool is to get a deep discount to begin with, not pay retail price for a hotel room?
As such, I would often start out with a very low price and incrementally increase it as necessary. However, this ended up taking a lot of time and required me to input my credit card information travel hawaii again and again every time I had to increase the price (since Priceline rejects your offer if it is below their undisclosed required pricing travel hawaii minimums).
It soon became clear that a more reliable procedure was needed. After some trial and error, I came up with the below process that has worked incredibly well for me during this past year maybe it will help you a lot too?
Overall, the strategy is pretty straight-forward and simple. I thought it would help, though, if I showed you a quick example of how putting this strategy to work goes. Thus, below is how I would apply this strategy for obtaining a 3-star hotel room in the Arlington, Virginia locale of the DC suburbs, from April 16th to April 18th, 2012.
For a 3 star hotel during the specified dates in Arlington, Virginia, Priceline is suggesting to use $270 as the median retail price for this type of hotel. However, it s important travel hawaii to note that this is a RETAIL price, and not the price that you re looking to obtain via the deep discount.
As I mentioned previously, I ve had pretty good success using this strategy travel hawaii to get low-priced hotel rooms over the past year. While I definitely won t make any claims about the method travel hawaii being flawless, it has indeed saved me a lot of money.
Listed below are some of the prices I ve landed recently, compared to the discount Travelocity prices of similar rooms . Both hotels were located in the Richmond, Virginia area a great place to find cheap hotels, by the way!
Shown below is a picture of the hotel room I had in the Best Western Plus. Not too shabby complete with a microwave and flat screen TV! You ll have to excuse the clothes on the beds, though. I was frantically getting ready to run a half marathon in the morning and had to wake up at 4:00 AM :)
Coincidentally, both of the prices obtained travel hawaii from Priceline were right around 60% of the prices quoted by Travelocity. So there may be a pattern there as well, but that would have to be the subject of a separate travel hawaii investigation.
And that s how I save on all my hotel rooms! Have any of you experienced similar results with these places? Do you use any other sites you find to be even better? travel hawaii If so, share your experiences below! That way we can all learn from them.
( EDITOR S NOTE: I absolutely LOVE this get a cheaper travel hawaii rate by going blind route w/ hotels. My personal tool of choice is Expedia , whicyh offers something very similar, and every time I give it a shot I m always presently surprised! travel hawaii Next time I m gonna try THIS one out though and see what happens :))
Personally I don t use the opaque travel sites as much as I used to since you can t collect the points for staying there. I know I pay a little bit more, but I have redeemed travel hawaii many a point for free travel (and to some really class hotels). Also you can earn yourself a little bit of status with a hotel chain and that can have some nice perks aswell!
I too prefer using Expedia (I love getting the points for traveling) travel hawaii and I ve never used Hotwire or Priceline. However, I ve always been really curious how they work. This is an excellent write up, and I definitely be using it a resource when I book my next set of travel plans. Thanks Jacob and J$.
I will definitely have to try some of those ideas out! For NY all I was going to do was find an area I wanted to stay in and then walk around and negotiate prices. My hubby didn t want to walk around (only flight we got was into Newark and travel time was going on 8 hours by the time we hit queens) so he found a hotel online that was deaply discounted travel hawaii because City was shutting the water off on Monday and we checked in on a Sunday! No worries because I will definitely be trying my negotiation travel hawaii skills next trip (Chicago)!
I use betterbidding.com to decode what the hotwire hotels might be before booking. They use the hotel star ratings the amenities listed to compare from past customer bookings. Everytime I have booked a hotel through hotwire betterbidding was spot on with the hotel outcome. travel hawaii Check it out!
Thanks for the tips! It s great how you use the two sites together to get a great rate. Do you have similar strategies for getting deals on plane tickets? I know those deals sites operate differently, but just curious if you ve figured out a hack there, too.
What s awesome about this post this is EXACTLY what I did this week with a room for some friends coming to town to be tourists. Well, I didn t go with the 70% amount, but I did get it quoted on hotwire and then underbid it on priceline. Same result.
I would also add to get preferred cards from the hotels you stay at. They often email you special offers and give you reward points for extras stays. I have a half dozen of these because travel hawaii I don t like getting locked in to one chain. This way I can go with the best deal and still get the rewards!
I frequently use Priceline s Name Your Own Price service, but I generally just put in 50% of the rate Priceline travel hawaii states (the only real issue I ve had with this was getting a hotel room in NYC in December even using NYOP, I paid probably close to 95% of what Priceline listed). I ll give a shot at comparing prices with Hotwire next time, as it seems like it might help me get even lower rates. Thanks for the tip!
Something travel hawaii else to consider if you have friends or family that work for major hotel chains, see if they can extend the friends/family discount , which is usually not that far off from the employee discount. As an employee of a major hotel chain, we get upwards 70% discount off regular price. This really comes in handy when you end up staying for $75 in a hotel that normally costs $300+.
Thanks for the tips! I ve never had much luck getting a deal on a hotel room, but I ve never compared the quotes between sites, good idea. We generally find it cheaper to rent a house or condo if we re on vacation, depending on the length of stay. Now if only there were more airfare deals!!
We ve pricelined a good few hotels for local stay-cations. Of course most hotels in downtown areas charge for parking. Check the reviews on Yelp and they usually tell you where to park for free or cheap and avoid the $20 a night parking fees. Yeah for free!
@Marius I ve had a lot of success with using VRBO.com for rentals (I rented a condo with a private pool for $360 for 8 days in Florida, a hotel would have been over $1200). For monthly rentals you may have better luck looking into executive suites at hotels and apartment complexes, they generally rent per week or per month, best bet would be to call around. Good luck. :)
I used to make our reservations, usually through Priceline, the night before. Now I make them right before we want to check in. We just go to a nearby McDonald s (they almost all have wifi) and make the reservation from the parking lot. (Since we eat at Mickey D s fairly often on road trips we don t feel bad about this.) I don t know if we get a better price since it s late in t