Saturday, June 20, 2009

Hotwire Hotel Identification Trick

If you book a lot of hotels you know that Hotwire often offers major discounts on great and medium quality hotels with the catch that you cannot know the exact location or name of the property.

I've used Hotwire often for Silicon Valley trips and I've been happy with the results - often paying about $50 per night for hotels that would normally run $75-$100 and up.

For major destinations like Las Vegas you can click on through the "continue" button after you have your list of hotels at Hotwire, and review the "TripAdvisor" review information at the lower left to (sometimes) learn the number of reviews for a given property. Now open a new browser window and go to TripAdvisor.com to review hotels in that map area.

This will often specifically identify the property for you *before you book*. This is a quirk and may be "fixed" soon, though I'm guessing the hotels are OK with this as long as it keeps the bookings going and higher paying customers don't find out that their neighbor paid half what they did for an identical room.

Here at Las Vegas blog we'll soon be posting a monthly chart where we try to identify these for you so you can use Hotwire more effectively.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Cirque's One Drop Water Charity Rocks!

Join Cirque du Soleil's founder and support the water charity "One Drop", which helps bring clean water to those who do not share the cozy comforts those of us in most in most of the world are lucky enough to enjoy: http://www.onedrop.org

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Bud Light $100,000 Hardbat Classic - Ping Pong Mania heads to Las Vegas this June

As an avid Table Tennis player I'm very excited to see the Bud Light Hardbat Classic Table Tennis Tournament head to Las Vegas on June 26-28. ESPN will cover the event and we'll see 1000 players compete for 100,000 first prize - huge money for the sport of Table Tennis and I'm pretty sure the biggest prize in US Table Tennis history.

Hardbat Table Tennis is *not* the mainstay of this sport, where spinny rubber rules and relatively few serious tournament players still use the old school "hard bat". Combine this with some handicapping rules at the tournament and it'll be sure to lead to fun and hard to predict outcomes.

Website for the Hardbat Classic

You can also follow the classic on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/hardbatclassic