Hipmunk wowed me with its new mapping feature that appears side-by-side with their hotel suggestions

The number of smartphone and tablet american express delta airline mileage credit card apps that allow a user to search for and bid on the lowest prices for upscale hotel rooms has dramatically increased in recent years. Using them, along with third-party booking sites like Kayak.com and the hotel's own app or website, can net travelers american express delta airline mileage credit card some surprising savings.
The most obvious method to suss out savings is to explore the pricing and inventory differences among standard booking sites like Hotels.com and Orbitz. But dig a little deeper and there are countless ways to find unpublished rates, american express delta airline mileage credit card typically on excess rooms hoteliers think they won t be able to sell at full or even publicly discounted prices. The problem: There are so many choices and so much information couched in bells and whistles that it s easy to become overwhelmed.
To tame this wild world into submission, I designed a five-step american express delta airline mileage credit card process (with a two-step american express delta airline mileage credit card 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, make tweaks as your situation requires.
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 Small Luxury Hotels of the World and circumvent this system. (Those with points collected at a fancy corporate american express delta airline mileage credit card job can choose to go that route.)
I m also going to ignore lodging american express delta airline mileage credit card 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.
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 off hotel rooms and to my surprise, actually worked almost every time I applied it in my testing.
I had always found Booking.com american express delta airline mileage credit card to have a wider array of budget choices in obscure parts of the world, but that was true even in Paris, where the site offered american express delta airline mileage credit card over twice as many properties as Orbitz. Hotels.com offered the best filtering experience, using sliding scales that allowed me to choose a precise upper limit for price ($110 per day) and a minimum user rating (2.5 of 5).
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 Pavillon Nation, $500 through american express delta airline mileage credit card Booking.com, american express delta airline mileage credit card which I got down to $480 using Orbitz s higher price but with the 10 percent code; and the Hotel Audran in Montmartre, highly rated and $440.
The same room at the Pavillon Nation was available for $382 (for four nights) through getaroom.com; no one could beat Hotels.com s price for the Audran. Then I checked both prices against the hotels own website, which sometimes american express delta airline mileage credit card have additional discounts.
Hipmunk wowed me with its new mapping feature that appears side-by-side with their hotel suggestions and even offers overlay heat maps to see which parts of the city are best for food or night life. (It is also the only American site to show Airbnb and HomeAway american express delta airline mileage credit card rentals american express delta airline mileage credit card alongside hotels.)
Trivago s main advantage is that it searches about 200 booking sites, meaning it will quite frequently find prices lower than the others, though don t necessarily expect prime customer service from obscure sites should you need to make a change later. And if you already spend time using the endless planning resources on TripAdvisor, you might as well book with its metasearch pricing american express delta airline mileage credit card component as well.
I spent the most time on Hipmunk, american express delta airline mileage credit card 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 american express delta airline mileage credit card and I added it to the list: the fairly central and well-rated Element H tel for $405 *again, for the four-night stay in Paris).
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.
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 american express delta airline mileage credit card name of Luxury Suites International at The Signature. But things get really american express delta airline mileage credit card weird when the site urges you to call for secret unpublished rates! american express delta airline mileage credit card (So 20th century!)
I plugged american express delta airline mileage credit card in my Paris dates, and getaroom.com revealed a flash deal ( Ends in three hours! ) at the nice-looking, decently reviewed Villa Lut ce Port Royal in Paris, four nights for $450. And then, what the heck, I called the toll-free number. And what do you know? A woman with a very soothing voice instantly lowered the price to $378. Get the Villa Lut ce on the list!
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 Kayak s packages page and it led me to a promising deal on Priceline.com: a round-trip, nonstop flight for two from New York to Paris, plus four nights at the Crowne Plaza Paris-Republique, for $2,505. The cheapest nonstop fare on my dates was $2,503.
In other words, four nights american express delta airline mileage credit card 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.
Some of the sharpest discounts off retail rates come from opaque deals on sites like Priceline and Hotwire. You get to decide american express delta airline mileage credit card on star-level and broad geographic area, and then either bid (as with Priceline) american express delta airline mileage credit card or choose a discount rate (as with Hotwire and Priceline s new Express Deals feature). Only when your credit card is charged do you find out where you ll be staying sometimes a soulless chain, but never, in my experience, a terrible place. Still, I do opaque american express delta airline mileage credit card as a last resort, usually when savings means more to me than anything else. (For, say, a romantic weekend, it s definitely a risk.)
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.
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 american express delta airline mileage credit card 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, american express delta airline mileage credit card 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 american express delta airline mileage credit card via email if it s easier or if you call and English turns out not to be the hotel s strong suit.)
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 Yapta.com send you alerts when prices american express delta airline mileage credit card drop, but let s be reasonable here. As your date of travel (and your cancellation deadline) approaches, try one of the many last-minute deal sites and apps. If there s a better deal, pull a switcheroo.
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.