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.

4 comments:

Joseph Hunkins said...

Hotwire hotels are: Hotwire.com

Another great source is Kayak.com for comparisons, and they also include links to Orbitz, Hotwire, etc.

However you should generally *also* check directly with properties as mroe and more are offering "matching best rates", so if you find it online you can sometimes get it directly from the property - with cancellation priviledges which are valuable - at same price.

Anonymous said...

I find that the best place to identify hotwire hotels in vegas is RedFlagVegas.com. They have a really easy to use list of all the hotels they offer on the strip, complete with amnenities to narrow down the results. It's like betterbidding, but easier to use :)

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