I have become spoiled when it comes to hotel rates.
I have paid $57 USD/night to stay in Beverly Hills, just one block from pricey Rodeo Drive. A few weeks earlier, I paid $48 USD/night to stay in the heart of Chicago, within a block of pricey Michigan Avenue.
These are clean, three-star, national-chain hotels. I am not a special guest who is afforded friendly rates because I write travel articles. You could do just as well, or even better!
Interested? There are at least five ways to get it done. Not every idea will work for every traveler, so there is no attempt here to rank the techniques. Still, it's likely at least two will work for you!
Technique #1: Bid for a room
Priceline.com allows you to decide what price you want to pay for a hotel room. As always, there is a catch: they pick the hotel, which you pay for sight-unseen with a non-refundable credit card payment.
But if your plans don't call for pin-point location, it's perhaps the best way to save big money on a nice room.
Before you bid, be sure to take advantage of Web sites like BiddingForTravel.com or BetterBidding.com for strategies. Bidders post their successful (and unsuccessful) bids in your destination city.
Hotwire.com will also allow you to pay, sight-unseen, for a low-cost room. Again, you must assume some risk.
What's in it for the hotels? These are rooms they either cannot sell or are unlikely to fill. They'd rather get something for the room than to have it sit vacant.
With that in mind, bidding for rooms doesn't always work out well. I found Priceline wasn't much help in Las Vegas at the time of a huge convention. Very small cities might not show up in the Priceline or Hotwire inventories.
But if you're headed to an expensive destination, it's worth a serious look.
The fear of empty rooms works in ways beyond the auctions. Click "next" to the right and read about it.
