Hotwire.com gives you a smattering of choices ranked by stars and grouped by location. You are not informed of the address of the choices or their name.
On the other hand, Priceline.com lets you bid a price that you would like to pay for a similar group of hotels batched by location and stars.
Priceline has some ‘gotchas’ that ensure that you don’t begin your bidding for a hotel room at $1.00 and simply up your game one dollar at a time until your bid is accepted by enforcing a rule that you can only make one offer per day per hotel grouping that you choose (location & # of stars).
The trick that I have learned is to do my research for hotel prices by doing a search via Hotwire.
I then take peruse the results of the Hotwire search and find the hotel that best fits my needs.
For instance, tonight I will be in the Fort Washington, PA area. The hotel that is the best value has a 3 star ranking and a price tag of $93 (plus Hotwire fees).
I then took this information over to Priceline.com and bid $75 for a 3 star hotel in Fort Washington, PA which worked like a charm.
I usually bid on Priceline.com $10 less than the price on Hotwire, but I was feeling plucky and gunned it for $18 lower.
You have to be careful about gunning it though because Priceline.com limits you to one bid per hotel grouping (which is defined as location and # of stars).
You can work around this limitation by having multiple Priceline.com accounts, or by simply limit the aggregate number of locations that you initially bid on to one, and if your bid is rejected, just expand the locations that you are willing to stay one bid at a time (Priceline clumps locations together so if you don’t get the hotel that you want in the town that you want you can usually expand your the area that you are willing to stay. This will allow you to increase your bid, and will likely not put you in an alternate town because you are using information from Hotwire that is specific to the locale that you want. In other words, the hotels in the next town over are priced higher than the ‘sweet spot’ that you found on Hotwire. Thus, by adding the additional location to your bid, you are still likely to be in the location that you want because the hotels in this additional location are not going to meet the value pricing information that Hotwire provided).
Hope this helps.
