Luxe Hotels, Low Prices
With the hotel business booming, great deals on upscale rooms are harder to come by -- but not if you know where to look.
From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, March 2005
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Tom Barnes of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., landed a room for one night at Miami's Clinton Hotel South Beach in October by submitting a winning $75 bid at Priceline.com (more on Priceline shortly). On arrival, Barnes paid $100 to upgrade to a suite with a Jacuzzi and a private, ocean-view balcony that would have cost $300 had he booked directly with the posh hotel first. "Upgrading has been so successful for me that I'm spoiled," Barnes says.
You'll boost your chances of upgrading if you join the frequent-stay rewards programs of the hotels you visit. Members are given preference for complimentary upgrades and first choice of fee-based upgrades. To the members go other spoils, too, such as free breakfasts and newspapers.
Blindfold booking
You can often save as much as a third off online travel agencies' and hotel Web sites' best deals by booking through two Web services that sell rooms (as well as airline tickets and rental cars) without disclosing the name of the hotel until you buy. We've found that at both Hotwire.com and Priceline.com the rates offered for four-star hotels are usually the best values. Our kvetch is that neither site refunds your money if you cancel.
Hotwire is the easier of the two to use. Choose your destination neighborhood, and the service lists rates from unnamed hotels, which are labeled from one to five stars. Hotwire will also show you a set price in advance; Priceline doesn't give you that information. At Priceline, you submit a bid after you specify a neighborhood and star class. Tip: Before you place a Priceline bid, gauge how low you can go by visiting the message boards at Biddingfortravel.com. There you'll find other Priceline users' successful and failed bids. (It takes about 15 minutes to set up an account to view the message boards.)
For example, over the past July Fourth weekend, Julie Hauer of Ashburn, Va., vacationed with her husband and daughter at the Omni William Penn, in Pittsburgh, for $70 a night, although the best rate on the Omni Web site was about $125. To arrive at her $70 Priceline bid, she researched recent successful bids for four-star hotels at Biddingfortravel. Hauer has had much success with this method, but she saves it for times when the hotel's exact location doesn't matter. "I've handled too many business trips to chance Priceline for those," she says.
When using Priceline you might have to cool your heels for 15 minutes or more before you learn if a hotel will accept your bid. If your bid is rejected, you can revise it to include hotels in another neighborhood or a different star level (or you can wait 72 hours to resubmit the same bid or even a higher bid). But the potential savings can justify the sweat. Successful bids we've seen listed at Biddingfortravel are often 20% (or more) lower than what we've seen at Hotwire for hotels with similar star ratings. (Hotwire says that there is no independent evidence that customers routinely find better deals at rival Priceline.)
One more tip: Instead of using Priceline's main Web site, use its page on auction site eBay (http://pages.ebay.com/travel), where you can earn free "anything points." For example, reserving a four-star hotel room at Priceline through that page can get you 1,500 points, which you can use to buy $15 worth of goods on eBay or exchange for about 700 American Airlines frequent-flier miles.