FINDING HOTEL ROOMS FOR LESS

It's getting more and more difficult to score cheap hotel rooms.

The U.S. economy may still be in the midst of a sluggish recovery, but the hotel industry is no longer suffering from the doldrums that hit it so hard after the market collapse. It's a simple formula: Room occupancy rates are up and so are rates.

The alternative to paying through the nose is to use blind booking services such as priceline.com or Hotwire.com -- "blind" meaning you don't know what hotel you're staying in until after your credit card has been charged. But that lack of vision isn't always a bad thing. Recently, I stayed at the Hilton Fort Lauderdale Airport, courtesy of priceline.com. I got my room for $85, a better deal than the $149 Hilton offered on its own website, or through other travel websites such ashotels.com, Expedia, and Travelocity.

I also booked a room a few weeks ago at the Sheraton Delfina Santa Monica, several blocks from the Pacific Ocean. Again, priceline.com saved me a substantial amount: I paid $100 for a room that Sheraton and other hotel websites were listing for $199 a night.

For a Good Deal, Sleep Near the Airport

The moral of these stories is that even when occupancy is going up, hotels are bound to have nights when they have empty rooms.

The hotels' problem is that they don't want their higher-paying customers to know that they'll discount deeply in order to fill some of those empty rooms. Therefore, they use services such as priceline.com or Hotwire.com to dump the rooms at bargain-basement rates. I've used both services several hundred times over the last few years, frequently staying in four-star hotels at rates as low as $50 a night.

The lowest rates I have discovered can be found at airport hotels, which can suffer from low occupancy rates more frequently than downtown hotels.

If you have your heart set on a particular hotel, these services are not the way to go: There's no guarantee that you will end up in the hotel you want. However, say you need to stay near the airport, and you don't care whether it's a Sheraton, Radisson, Marriott or Hilton. Then, priceline.com or Hotwire are viable options.

Beware the One-Star Hotel

Users of the services do have some choices. They pick the "star rating" of the hotel, usually one to four stars, as well as the general location of the hotel. In a large city like New York City, priceline.com offers 15 different zones.

The sites are not without flaws, particularly when it comes to booking low-end establishments. Their ratings are usually accurate, particularly when it comes to four-star hotels. But from my experience, one- or two-star hotels may not even live up to low expectations.

I've booked one- or two-star hotels on the sites many times and landed in a perfectly acceptable La Quinta Inn or Days Inn.However, I've also ended up in a few "trucker motels." When I checked into one in Dover, Del., there was a bra still on the bed of my run-down, 1970s-style room.

Hotwire did refund my money after I explained that situation.

I later learned that neither priceline.com nor Hotwire do their own hotel inspections. Instead, they weed out lodging establishments or downgrade them based on customer reviews.

Simplicity vs. Frugality
The two basic differences between the two services is that on priceline.com, you bid on the hotel room, while on Hotwire the price is already displayed. Hotwire also lists the amenities of a particular hotel, such as a swimming pool, Internet service, a business center, etc.

One key disadvantage of both services is that they usually won't guarantee bedding choices. That's not a problem if you're a single traveler and you don't care if you're in a room with one or two beds. It can be an annoyance for two people who aren't a couple traveling together, because the hotel is under no obligation to provide a room with two beds.

Priceline.com is also a little more complicated to use than Hotwire. Since the rates are not set, like on Hotwire, travelers need to come up with a winning bid to snag a room. If your bid is too low, you are locked out of making the same reservation for 24-hours. However, there are ways to game the system. Priceline.com will allow you to re-bid if you change some characteristics of your original requests such as your star level, the particular area in which you want to stay in, or the day of the check-in/check-out.

I've found that you usually can get slightly better deals on priceline.com then Hotwire. The tactic I use to get rooms at the lowest rate is to first look at the Hotwire rate for a specific star-level of hotel in a location and underbid it by 10% on the priceline.com website.

Of course, if that underbidding on priceline.com fails and you don't want to wait 24 hours to try again, you can always go back to the Hotwire site and score a room then and there.

One helpful website that can guide you in your bidding choices is calledBiddingForTravel.com. Priceline.com and Hotwire bidders disclose their winning bids to the website, along with the name of the hotel they landed, giving future travelers some guidance about what acceptable bids may be.

Rooms booked through both services are nonrefundable, though I have found that a customer service representative will work with you to rectify an error such as booking on the wrong night. Unfortunately, that means an extra fee, such as a $25 charge to rebook for a different night.

You Get What You Pay For

Can you get stuck with a dud hotel while using these services? Based on my experience, the answer is no -- as long as you stick to bidding for hotels with a minimum of three stars.

That doesn't mean, however, that you will absolutely love your hotel.

I was excited several years ago when my priceline.com bid was accepted for $150 a night in Midtown Manhattan, especially when I found out I would be staying at the trendy Hudson Hotel. It seemed like a good deal given that rooms on the hotel's website started at $400 a night.

What I didn't anticipate was the 100-square-foot room I ended up in. The bathroom was so small that I couldn't sit on the toilet and keep the bathroom door closed at the same time.

The room might have been claustrophobic, but at least I got a good deal -- which is what blind hotel booking sites are all about.

SCORE A CHEAPER HOTEL ROOM

Learning how to nab a good hotel at a cut rate is a nifty life skill for all travelers. But nobody appreciates saving a few hundred dollars more than a parent planning a family trip, especially this summer. According to the AAA’s annual vacation costs survey of over 60,000 food and lodging establishments, the average family of four will spend nearly $270 a day on meals and hotels, to say nothing of record-high gas prices and soaring admission fees to zoos, theme parks, and other family attractions. Lodging rates now average $152 a night, up nearly 8 percent from last summer.

The good news? Savvy hotel shopping isn’t rocket science. Anyone can pick it up in 20 minutes.

Shopping online for a great hotel rate is a lot like searching for a super airfare. No single web site will find the lowest hotel price each and every time. Fortunately, booking a hotel is more straightforward than booking a flight. Since hotel room prices don’t fluctuate as much as airfares do, there’s no guessing game about when to buy. To find the best price, you need to arm yourself with information and then do some talking.

Scenario A: You’ve Picked a HotelStep 1: Get a feel for price
Just like when you shop for airline tickets (see 19 Sites For Savvier Air Travel), it makes sense to start with the big three mega booking engines when you compare hotel prices. Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity are so competitive that their lowest quotes are often within just a few dollars of each other.

Step 2: Go to the aggregators
Aggregators mine from a large pool of sources—major booking engines, hotel sites, travel operators, lodging consolidators, you name it— to find the best rates. But since each aggregator mines from a different mix of sources, searching multiple aggregators will often yield varied results. The upshot: You should check as many as you can. If you only have time for two, our favorites are Kayak and Hotels.com.

Step 3: Visit the hotel’s web site
It always pays to compare prices from the booking engines and aggregators to the hotel’s own web site. Some hotels guarantee that their online rates are the lowest you’ll find. And all prices being equal, it’s best to book directly with the hotel and avoid service charges.

Step 4: Call the hotel directly
You’ve already visited the web site, so why call? Because negotiating is a crucial last step that works more often than you’d think, according to a recent survey of 35,000 Consumer Reports readers. More than 70 percent of respondents who haggled with hotel staff scored a rate reduction or room upgrade. When a hotel isn’t fully booked, reservationists are often empowered to beat any other rate—even its own online rate. To bargain effectively, you must be armed with the information you’ve gathered online. The conversation is like a dance. You ask how much it costs to stay in a particular category of room. The reservationist gives you the rack rate. Next, you ask two key questions:

• 
  Scenario B: You’re Flexible About Brand Two discount brokers, Hotwire and Priceline, are known for delivering some of the best hotel deals on the web, but there’s one big catch: Neither one will tell you which hotel you’ve got until after you’ve paid. Instead, you approve some basic parameters—general description, location, level of luxury—and they come up with hotels that match your criteria. If you’re willing to relinquish control over brand and book “blind,” you can be rewarded with a terrific hotel at a great price.“Is that the very best price you can offer?”
  One of two things is going to happen. The reservationist might hold firm and tell you that’s the best she can do. If you’ve seen a better offer on the web, say so. Very often, this works like a magic password. We’ve seen reservationists shave as much as $40 off their initial offer, simply because we’d done our homework. Like Grandma always said, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
• “Do you have any special packages for families?”
  There might be a great deal for families that you missed online. Family packages sometimes include a discount on a second guestroom, free kid’s meals, comped passes to a local attraction, free pizza and a movie, or a combination of these elements.

Scenario C: You Need A Specialist Want a fab rate at a hip, boutique city hotel? The name to know is Quikbooks. Unlike most booking sites, Quikbooks only sells hotel rooms—not flights, car rentals, cruises, or packages—and it specializes in very stylish urban digs. We love how you pay nothing until checkout. And Quikbooks guarantees that its price will still be the lowest 72 hours after booking—two days longer than the typical 24-hour promise you see at other booking sites.

What tops our dream list of once-in-a-lifetime travel experiences? A night in the Old Faithful Inn, in Yellowstone National Park. No, wait—make it a weekend at the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, which boasts mind-blowing views overlooking the north rim of the giant abyss. To reserve a room at either of these national treasures, you need to go through Xanterra, the nation’s largest operator of park-based hotels and restaurants. This is a particularly useful site for planning a summer or two ahead, since the most popular lodges can get sold out that far in advance.

Most pet-oriented travel sites make our fur stand up. Behind every cutesy name lurks a computer-generated list of hotels whose managers simply ticked the survey box that says “pets accepted.” More often than not, reviews have been lifted from a mainstream travel site and don’t even mention pets. So where can you find some genuine doggie love? At PetsWelcome.com, whose “Lodgings Listings” section is segmented into more than 15 categories, from B&Bs and hotel chains to vacation rentals, ski resorts, and campgrounds. You can also narrow your search to find establishments that accept larger dogs (75+ lbs) and cats. We love the “Search By Route” tool. You type in your starting point and destination, and the site pulls up a map flagged with pet-friendly lodgings along the way. If we had tails, they’d be wagging.

WeJustGotBack.com is an authoritative online guide to family trip-planning. The site features reviews of kid-friendly hotels and resorts, expert planning advice, readers' travel tips, city insider guides, vacation deals, and more. Subscribe to our newsletter to hear about resort specials and exclusive, money-saving offers.