Online Travel Booking and Bidding Agencies - Where do you look for hotels?

I've always used Travelocity or Expedia when I want to search across brands for available hotels. But lately, more and more hotels show up with "special buy" rates, supposedly exclusive to Expedia or T'City, which are pre-pay and non-refundable. And if a hotel has these rates, it won't show any of the normal rates (unless I'm missing something).

So if I want to book a room, but can't 100% commit that I won't need to cancel, where should I look?

You will have to give up some of the price for the ability to cancel, there are many more pre paid rooms out there then there use to be. I would call the hotel directly and see if they will give you the room for that rate without the pre pay, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, but in any case make sure you ask what the cancelation policy is, some have crreped up to three or four days, not just before 6 on the same day.

Try www.travelweb.com (http://www.travelweb.com)

Kathy

1800USAHotels (1800usahotels.com) has some special rates that don't require prepay. They are scattered throughout, tho, and if the special rates don't exist or aren't available for a certain property, it's no better than any other booking engine usually.

If you're going to a big city, check for a city-specific reservations service. One such service is Captiol Reservations for Washington, DC. (capitolreservations.com) They have a list of special rates, and they aren't prepay. Standard credit card guarantee and hotel's own cancel policy apply. I am kind of guessing, but I think there would be services like this for other large, popular cities.

Quikbook (quikbook.com) doesn't require prepayment for many of their reservations. The cities are limited, but they have some more unusual choices for a discount broker in my experience (some boutique hotels, etc.) Always worth a look.

The big preplay player is Hotel Reservations Network (HRN, hoteldiscount.com) which after examination I have found is also the provider of the prepaid deals to Travelocity. HRN is still a step above a bid service like Priceline and Hotwire. You get to choose the hotel, and the cancellation policy doesn't lose you the entire prepaid amount. Unfortunately it's not uniform; they say to check cancellation policy of each hotel on their site individually. It's impossible to say that HRN is always so much better of a deal that it's worth risking the cancel fee, but at times it can be quite a deal.

Some of the hotels offer prepay-only web specials right on their sites. I have seen it at Wyndham and Radisson.

For absolutely the best price, it's hard to beat a well-made Priceline bid, but of course you know the pitfalls. Not only do you pay in advance, but you don't get to choose the hotel, just a general area, and you don't get frequent stay credit in most cases. (Some hotels will give it to you, you can try.) Of use to some folks, but probably not too many around here will care for that in most circumstances.

One thing I will say that HRN and Capitol Reservations (and maybe QuikBook) do get right is the listing with prices. If you have a few different hotels in mind, there are very few sites who can easily get you the comparative prices. TravelWeb is a great resource, indeed the booking engine behind many of the hotel chains' own sites, but you can only look up the price of one place at a time when it comes down to it. Clumsy interface. 1800USAHotels used to give a totally misleading listing; now I think it's just $$$ ratings. (The prices in their listing were only the lowest possible, with no indication of them being available on your dates without further clicking.) Even Travelocity gives some misleading listings at times. Orbitz may have a cleaner interface, but I've not known it to have any great deals in hotels. Expedia, perhaps, I'm not a fan and often don't check it. Personally I'm generally well-served by a Priceline bid a lot of the time.


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--Greg

Let me be more specific with my particular challenge. Every year I travel to New Orleans for Jazzfest. This is probably one of the toughest hotel ressies to find anywhere - many hotels are already sold out 11 months prior to the event.

The fest runs over 2 weekends, and I'm never sure that far in advance which weekend I'm going, or how many will be in my party. So I like to book both weekends, then cancel one once I've decided, say 2-3 months prior.

I don't mind paying a little more for this flexibility, but I don't want to pay double, so pre-pay isn't an option.

There are easily over a hundred hotels within a couple of miles of downtown N.O., so calling each one to find the best value isn't practicle.

I did try travelweb, and having to click twice (!) to get to the pricing page is pretty cumbersome. But the bigger headache is that many hotels show "vacancy", but when you click thru, they immediately show as unavailable. (I've seen this on Expedia & T'City too, and I don't understand why they can't be more accurate).

At 2-3 months prior, I should think you could still beat a "regular" reservation with a bid or prepay. Not that I wouldn't keep making those two bookings as you are doing, but I would make those as backup. Then, at the 2-3 month point when you *know* which weekend you are going, start going through the prepay services to see if there's something better. At that point you can check HRN, for instance. They buy blocks of rooms and resell them, so sometimes they have availability when the hotel itself doesn't. May not be true for such a busy event, but you never know without trying. Quikbook could be a good option for New Orleans. You can see their list of all their area hotels here http://www.quikbook.com/2010.asp Click on each one to see info and to find out the cancellation policy. I clicked on a few, and it seemed that as long as you cancel more than 4 days before, you're okay. A call to Quikbook would probably confirm that. So you may be able to use them even for initial reservations. And even then you could still try to bid on Priceline when you know for sure.

At a year ahead of time, it's hard to know if you're getting the best deals anyway. I mean, there are some obvious things, of course, but if price is the main concern, it's going to be tough. Again you may want to see if there's a New Orleans-specific discount service (I don't know of one off hand, but there could be one) that doesn't require prepay. Beyond that, just the same old booking engines I mentioned above are pretty much all you get. And as you have found, they aren't always the most useful things.

I hope this helps a little bit. Keep asking away if there's still more. With a little work you can get a good deal, I think. I mean, it's not like you're deciding to go with only a week or two left before the fest. http://www.flyertalk.com/travel/fttravel_forum/wink.gif


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--Greg

Advance bookings for JazzFest are way off this year. The Hyatt Regency had an $83/night Internet-only rate available for the second weekend of JazzFest as recently as mid-February and it wasn't much over $100 for the first weekend. Finding the best deal during periods of high occupancy will take time, but in the case of JazzFest, they are still out there. You have to be diligent, continuing to check frequently because hotels adjust their rates just like airline adjust airfares.

Just so you'll know, double booking as you indicated you do just compounds the problem. The more people that do that, the less hotels are able to accurately project their occupancy levels and lead to falsely inflated rates.

I have followed the hotel industry very closely for the past 3 years and I've always maintained that the only way to be assured of finding the best rate is to check the websites of the individual hotels. You will never learn of an Internet-only rate by calling and it's not that unusual that a hotel can have an Internet-only rate that is 60%-70% lower than their next lowest available rate. Lack of flexibility rarely gets a very good deal. The more constraints you place on your travel plans, the higher the likelihood you'll pay more.

Boy, I wish I'd seen that Hyatt rate!

I do realize my booking habits don't help the situation, but I don't see an alternative.

Thnaks all for the suggestions.

I go to Jazz Fest and run into similar difficulties each year (esp. with a group of friends and various schedules). I like the interface at www.orbitz.com (http://www.orbitz.com) the best for hotels and I've found some good deals there. Also check out the classifieds in the Times Picyune. They often have apartment rentals for groups. I did that two years ago and it worked out really well.

This site is basically a "one stop" aggregation of hotel rates provided by other booking agents such as Travelweb and TravelNow, along with about a dozen others. It includes photos and compares rates on a single, but very long page. For quick reference, top hotel properties for any given city are located in the upper right hand corner and pointing at their names will generate a description box indicating their price range. There are also handy links to many popular and some rather obscure travel booking agents on the homepage.

http://hotels-shopper.com/

I have looked and booked:
-At the website from the hotel chains (Hilton, Starwood, SRS and others)
-Expedia
-http://www.hrs.com (for Europe)
-http://www.travelweb.com (for weekend specials worldwide)
-Local websites like http://www.parishotels.com
-and I make a search with Google

[This message has been edited by USAFAN (edited 07-23-2002).]

I got a cheap rate for a one night Friday stay in Las Vegas at www.off2vegas.com (http://www.off2vegas.com)

Check out:

www.ase.net (http://www.ase.net)

Kidz:
Thanks. "Your" ase.net is actually a hotel search engine with links to reservation systems; a portal of hotel portals. I bookmarked it.
I do such a search now with Google. When I found a hotel, want more information, the best price, I search in Google with the hotel name. This way I get a lot of information about the hotel and it saves me sometimes some money.