Australia, New Zealand & the South Pacific - Finding Good Deals for Hotels in Sydney and Melbourne, AUS

Decided at the last minute to head to Sydney and Melbourne over the week of Thanksgiving. Anyone have any good tips in finding last minute hotel deals? Any thoughts on Priceline? I will be traveling alone and not planning on a car, so I want to be able to easily get around. For this reason, I'm not sure if the Name Your Own Price feature on Priceline is wise.
Thanks for your thoughts.

Moved to appropriate forum....

go to
http://www.wotif.com/
or
http://www.needitnow.com.au/

also remember that hyatt is running a promo where if you stay twice and charge it to a mastercard you get a free room. if you can do it fast enough, and cheap enough it might be an alternative for australia

we found wotif always had the best deals for last minute bookings, though you might try accomline.com (which i think has since been renamed) as well.

we actually booked direct thru hilton and marriott for those cities as the rates were better than what was offered by wotif, but YMMV.

If the OP can search this forum, you will find a lot of useful discussion of hotel booking sites.

I did post an article and a few links around a month back. A great regular poster here, futaris, often posts sales. If you get to the 'search this thread' button just above the first post of the page, you will see that you can search by topic name AND by author.

Doing both will help you locate the threads fairly quickly.
I had success with www.lastminute.com.au a few weeks ago but have used www.wotif.com and www.hotelclub.net (and its sister site for last-minute deals ratestogo).

I'd follow the advice above, the direct sites and deals sites in case there is a special offer at the time, such as Fri-Sun days.

The travel bidding sites (with advice re. hotel costs for Sydney hotels) have often shown good deals for the Sydney Harbour Marriott.

You will be able to find a lot of useful information on FT if you look! ^
Have a good flight and I wish you a great deal and a fun stay. :)