Travel Tip: get best hotel deals

If you’re anything like me (I hope not!) when you start to plan a trip you focus heavily on the air fares. If I’m off to Vegas, I work the www.kayak.com and www.southwest.com until my fingers are sore — looking to save $10 or $20.

And, only later do I remember that I’m very much likely to spend more money on hotels than anything else. There are bargains to be found in hotels that could easilty exceed the savings that hours’ of web work on air fares achieve.

It doesn’t always work perfectly but it’s always worth trying this simple 5-step program:

1. Look to one of the big searchers — kayak, travelocity, hotel.com
– to see what they come up with. These are good and likely will produce something you can live with.
2. Then go to www.tripadvisor.com and look at what the people are saying about the hotel — and what price they are offering.
3. If you see that the Hilton, say, is showing up as in the range you’re liking, go to the Hilton web page and look for specials that will not show up in the more generalized web pages.
4. Check the city’s or region’s tourism council or convention bureau web pages. They often have bargains set aside — or list other hotels that you hadn’t explored.
5. Armed with this information, call the Hilton reservations (almost always a toll-free number) and ask if they have any special-specials going on, any last-minute openings or whatever.
This won’t work in the Motel 8 in Tuile Bush, Arkansas, but it may produce a neat bargain in one of the bigger chains and bigger towns.

A lot of work? Sure. But recently we went to Las Vegas — where the hotel prices are pure zaniness. I saw that the listed prices for really nice places came up in the $150- $175 a night range on the big search engines, $125 to $150 on the company pages’ list of rack rates.
I called one of the nicer hotels and asked them if they could do better. Yes, they could. I got a great room for under $100, saving lots of money which I promptly lost in the casinos. But it was house money — and I had the satisfaction of working the system instead of being worked by it.

I haven’t had the same luck in New York, but people tell me that they have — so it’s always worth a try.

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