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.