No one site will always have the best hotel deals. You have to check around to find the web site for the hotels you’re interested in, call the 800 number and the hotel itself. A lot of deals are unique to one venue or another. Also, ask about AAA, AARP rates etc. And then check a week or two beforehand to see if anything new has popped up.
Everyone seems paranoid about getting the best airfares when in fact we find that the lodging costs are usually the biggest expense when we go on vacation. Maybe it’s because airline travel is much more a commodity: there’s much less variation (and much less choice) among air carriers than among hotels, so it makes more sense to compare them on price.
What Websites offer cheap hotel deals?
You can try naming your own price on Priceline, but you won’t be able to choose the specific hotel you stay at. You can, however, select the area of a city you want to stay in.
How do I get the best deal on my hotel room?
You need to employ every trick in the bag to get the best rate on hotels. You need to check online: it’s good to check with several online agencies - Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity. You need to check aggregator site such as Sitessidestep, Mobissimo and Kayak. You should also check with the travel agent, and finally the best thing to do is to call the hotel directly and ask if there are any specials or deals. Make sure you talk about whether you can offer AAA, or an autoclub membership - an AARP if you’re a member of AARP. If you’re traveling on business, ask for the hotel’s corporate rate. You need to check all of those to make sure you get your best deal on a hotel room.
Older or retired people can often get good deals through AARP and sometimes through senior citizen discount programs, although they are not senior citizens. So you should check with the hotel and see if there are any of those rates available a they can be very good deals.
Auto Club cards come in very handy when you are booking hotel rooms and looking for a discount. You should always ask if the hotel offers a discount for your Auto Club membership.
There are several ways to book a hotel room. You can go through a travel agent, and that’s someone who often has first hand knowledge of the room and has actually seen the property, so that person can give you a good close-up view of that hotel and whether it’s a good fit for you. A travel agent can also help you to get a good rate on a hotel room. You can go through the hotel directly. You can call its toll free number or its local number and book directly with its reservations people.
There’s some fairly standard pitfalls when you’re booking a hotel room online. For example, the hotel room that you’re seeing in the pictures may be the one that’s been recently redecorated, whereas you might be staying in an older part of the hotel, in a room that hasn’t been redecorated. So your expectation is you’re going to get this great room, and you end up not getting a great room. Another pitfall when booking a hotel room online may be that you’ll be charged.