Hotwire

When people travel long distance, they often focus on the price of the air fare, but the biggest cost item in travel is very frequently the hotel where you stay.

I have had quite good luck using Hotwire (www.hotwire.com), but I do think there are limitations to this service.

Here’s how it works.  You choose the category of hotel where you’d like to stay (by stars) and you choose the city and the area.  Hotwire offers you a price and a list of hotels (without names) with the desired category and area.  It won’t show the name of the hotel until you have committed to the deal and paid with your credit card.  You pay in advance and your reservation is not refundable.

If your stay is a repetition of a previous trip, it is sometimes easy to guess which hotel they are going to put you in.  Also, you can sometimes do some clever detective work entering key words into Google.

The advantage is that you can get some excellent rates at some nice hotels, but, like everything else, there are a few catches and pitfalls.  Here are a few tips to using Hotwire effectively.

1.  Forget about upgrades, points, and any loyalty plan, such as Hilton Honors.  Your deal is with Hotwire, and you will typically be given the least desirable room in the hotel.

2.  This is the big catch!  If you fail to show up on the appointed day, your entire reservation will be canceled.  (Yes, you did read that right!).  For example, you cannot travel on the day you thought you could and you show up a day late at the hotel.  The desk will tell you that there is no reservation for you.  This nearly happened to me during the snow in Washington in February.  I had booked two rooms for five nights, and many flights were canceled because of the snow.  The hotel offered no help whatsoever, and Hotwire said that they might be able to work something out because of the exceptional circumstances.  But, in the future, I am going to make a reservation for the first night and for subsequent nights separately.

3.  Do comparison shopping.  Hotwire is not always the cheapest solution.  I have sometimes found that they cannot get you a very good price if you try to book too far in advance probably because they are in the business of clearing out a chain’s unsold inventory.

4.  If you want to have a clue about the hotel you are going to get, Hotwire seems to do a lot of business with Holiday Inn, including its other brands (Crowne Plaza and Intercontinental).

5.  Remember your stay does not include breakfast.  At certain hotels, particularly airports, there may be no other choice than to eat the over-priced hotel breakfast.

Here are a couple of examples that I have had from Hotwire.

• I booked a four-star hotel during the busy and very expensive holiday season in New York, and I got the Intercontinental for about $160.
• I booked a 3.5-star hotel in the Ealing, Brentford and Hammersmith area of London in February.  I got the Holiday Inn in Brentford, which was wonderful for $55.

So, I recommend it, but would certainly not recommend using Hotwire for every stay.  Besides, they tend to operate only in very popular areas.