http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/travel/7-steps-to-a-cheaper-hotel-room.html 2014-09-24 04:02:26 7 Steps to a Cheaper Hotel Room Confused about how to find a good deal on a place to stay? The Frugal Traveler put together this guide to help you land the right room at the right price. === There are so many ways to wrangle deals on hotel rooms these days that no matter how great a bargain you find, it’s not uncommon to worry you missed a better one. The most obvious method to suss out savings is to explore the pricing and inventory differences among standard booking sites like To tame this wild world into submission, I designed a five-step process (with a two-step bonus round) and tested it out by planning an imaginary four-night trip to Paris over Labor Day Weekend. Though the same general strategy should work for most kinds of trips, feel free to make tweaks as your situation requires. (For more tips on finding last-minute hotel deals, read my colleague This guide, of course, is for budget travelers. Those with deeper pockets and a willingness to delve into them can just go browse a site like I’m also going to ignore lodging strategies at the other end of the price spectrum — staying with a friend or a member of hospitality exchange sites like Couchsurfing, braving hostel dorm rooms — or alternatives, such as vacation rental companies like Airbnb and Homeaway. We’re looking for actual hotels. But if you’re looking for a decent, well-located room — maybe even one with a little style — this system should come close to finding you the best deal possible. 1) Get the lay of the land Log on to a regular old online booking site, plug in your dates, adjust the filters — especially ones that involve cost and location (“spa” and “golf course” are probably not relevant) — and browse through your choices, paying attention to user reviews, cancellation policies and whether all taxes are included. Make a note of your top picks. Of course, these sites are very different, which became obvious when I went searching for that Paris room. Orbitz, for example, is so inflexible that there’s not even a filter for price. Yet I couldn’t ignore its discount code that claims to knock 10 percent hotel rooms — and to my surprise, actually worked almost every time I applied it in my testing. I had always found I ended up with a couple options as a baseline (all rates are for four nights, and include most or all taxes and fees): the 2) Price check (and search again) Next step: Check the prices you’ve found first at The same room at the Pavillon Nation was available for $382 through Then do your whole search over on other metasearch sites, which are sometimes better than the standard sites anyway. Aside from Kayak, there are a few options: Hipmunk Trivago I spent the most time on Hipmunk, adding easy-to-use filters and then having it order hotels by “Ecstasy,” its mysterious but useful algorithm. The resulting No. 1 choice was quite appealing and I added it to the list: the fairly central and well-rated I now had three choices for about $100 a night, taxes included. But those are all retail or published sale rates, easily searchable (as I found). Time to try a few of the best ways to find unpublished rates. 3) Seek hidden rates If you want a window into the world of unpublished discounts, fiddle around for a while on getaroom.com. That site offers fast-expiring flash deals, for example, and rooms at “hotels within hotels” — like those within the MGM Grand complex in Las Vegas sold under the rather made-up-sounding name of I plugged in my Paris dates, and getaroom.com revealed a flash deal (“Ends in three hours!”) at the nice-looking, decently reviewed 4) Look for a package deal If you’ve already booked a flight, or are going on a longer, more complicated trip, package deals won’t work. But this straightforward, in-and-out New York-to-Paris trip is exactly the sort where a package deal might be the trick. (Trips to sunny destinations in the winter also work pretty well.) I went to In other words, four nights at the four-star Crowne Plaza would essentially cost 50 cents a night. I even contacted Priceline to make sure there were no hidden charges. They said the plane might charge me for luggage — um, yep, that much I knew. Assuming I hadn’t booked a flight, this was clearly my winner so far. 5) Go opaque Some of the sharpest discounts off retail rates come from opaque deals on sites like Priceline and Hotwire. You get to decide on star-level and broad geographic area, and then either bid (as with Priceline) or choose a discount rate (as with Hotwire and For those Paris dates, Priceline offers an Express Deal on a three-star room in the Marais-Republique area for $345. Not bad! Hotwire had a very similar deal in the same area for $351 — most likely the same hotel. Now review your options and make a choice. If I went for the package, or the Priceline deal, I was all set. For any of the other choices, I had two more possible steps. 6) Make the call Call the place you’ve chosen (by Skype, to save money). Tell them you’re about to reserve their hotel with, let’s say, Hotels.com, and ask if they’ll give you a discount for booking direct. Hotels typically pay a 20 to 30 percent commission to booking sites, so rationally speaking, they should be eager to split the difference with you. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t — it depends a lot on who answers the phone and what kind of power they’ve been given; at smaller places always ask to speak to the owner or manager. (You can also ask for a discount via email if it’s easier or if you call and English turns out not to be the hotel’s strong suit.) 7) Last-minute adjustments This final step only applies if you’ve got a cancelable reservation, but with lower-cost hotels that’s often the case. Theoretically, you could check back every day to look for better deals, or have a site like And — you’re off to Paris. Sure, it was a lot of work, but it gets easier with practice. Admittedly, it was never quite as easy as clicking over to Small Luxury Hotels of the World — as I did just for the fun of it. It took me about three minutes to choose the Hotel Relais Christine, on the site of a former medieval abbey on the Left Bank. Cost: $2,688, nonrefundable. But it’s not a flash sale, so perhaps the price will still be available in my next life.