Best websites for hotel rooms

[HadEnuff]

I used to use Priceline, but got burned once by a "4 Star" hotel that was pretty bad.
I've had decent luck with Hotels.com

DW and I are planning a few days in Savannah, GA, in April.

What strategies would you use to get the best room for the least money? Also, if you are familiar with Savannah (I am not) where would you recommend staying, both in terms of what area of the city, and specific hotels?

thanks,

 

[MasterBlaster]

I read that the thing to do is to use websites like Hotels.com to narrow your hotel choices. Then call the hotel(s) directly and tell them you want a great "deal". They often give you a deal as good or better than the robo-websites. And sometimes you can negotiate a better room.

Anyway I have no personal experience with this but reading it makes it seem somewhat plausible.

- Good luck - let us know how it turns out

 

[Bflotomny]

I have used Travel Advisor along with the hotels own site for reviews. But for pricing I go to the hotels corporate site and put in flexible dates and AARP/Senor rates. I've done well.
Beware that Booking.com requires payment up front and its a hassle to get refunds. Learned that from a hotelier. Same goes for Holiday Inn corporate site. They quote low ball prices but to get then they require payment up front for the low price. If you want the ability to cancel until the last minute the price is higher.
With the issues associated with travel; planes,trains and auto's I rather be able my ability to cancel without charges.

 

[Moemg]

We stayed at the Planter's Inn. It was an easy walk to all the attractions . It includes a continental breakfast & a wine & cheese reception.

 

[audreyh1]

I usually use Tripadvisor to picks the best hotel in a given location, then search booking sites as well as the hotel's site for the best deal.

Hotel sites often offer AAA rates at a good discount beating many other rates.

 

[Sarah in SC]

I always stay at the Thunderbird in Savannah. But it is, ahem, an acquired taste. An old 1950s era motel that has been modernized to some degree. But we love it.

I would start somewhere like Kayak or whatever, then check prices against the hotel website and also any credit card portals you might have, like Chase Ultimate Rewards.
I've also stayed outside of the downtown area, when I was using points and got a better deal, but that means driving in, instead of walking around.

If you are just a couple, and not a crowd, stay safe by not straying off the main streets at night. It can be a dangerous place, in some areas, something that is not always apparent to the first time visitor.

Fun city, though. And you can drink on the street!

 

[Gone4Good]

This is our basic approach to finding the best hotel deal, listed in order.

• Tripadvisor has pretty broad coverage so it's good to start there. Its especially useful when filtering for "specialty lodging" because many of those places don't show up on any other hotel site and can't be booked on line
  
• Bookings.com has a huge inventory of properties, so they're usually my second stop. It's also helpful to go to the map so you can see where all the hotels are located (super important for us because location, location, location).
  
• Bookings again to look at specific room details. I don't think anyone else has the detail that they do.
  
• Agoda for booking hotels in Asia
  
• Once we've found our property we check Trivago, Hotelscombined, to do a broad price comparison across multiple sites. Sometimes you really do find a cheaper price this way.
  
• Hotel website. If you're traveling in the U.S. and are a AAA member you can often get the best price by using the hotel site and AAA rate.
  
• Hotels.com is always our last stop because they have the very best rewards program - equal to 10% off the best published internet price. If Hotels.com has a room in the hotel we want to stay we'll book with them every single time. If we've found a better price somewhere else, we ask Hotels to match it and they do. After 10 nightly stays, we get a coupon to use equal to the average nightly rate of our last 10 nights to use on a future reservation.
  
  We've redeemed well over $1,000 worth of Hotel.com rewards during the last 2 years. And those discounts come on top of the very best internet rate we could find anywhere. In fact, we just went back and calculated that we saved $350 on just our upcoming trip to Portugal.
  

 

[Bamaman]

Booking.com has an incredible number of hotel rooms in every city in the world.

I'll sign in and filter my search lowest price to highest price. Then I'll look for properties with abnormally high customer ratings--for a relatively inexpensive room. I'll then read their evaluations and sometimes will go to TripAdvisor to see what their people say about the Booking.com property. We've never been disappointed, and are usually very satisfied.

In the U.S., I usually stay at one of the Choice Hotels or LaQuinta. We seldom travel outside of cities I'm very familiar win. Choice often has a special where you stay in two different properties and you get one free night.

 

[GravitySucks]

I use TripAdvisor for planning and if the rates are within a couple of bucks I use Hotels.com to book and get my rewards night.
I used Travelocity for the first time in years last week and it was a nightmare. I'll never use them again.

 

[audreyh1]

I use TripAdvisor for planning and if the rates are within a couple of bucks I use Hotels.com to book and get my rewards night.
I used Travelocity for the first time in years last week and it was a nightmare. I'll never use them again.

I didn't know Travelocity still existed!

 

[GravitySucks]

I didn't know Travelocity still existed!

Yeah I'm pretty sure Expedia bought them. They offered 20% off if you download the Travelocity app but they messed up the reservation, hung up on us repeatedly when trying to resolve the issue then somehow canceled the account once they credited it for screwing up.

Danged Gnomes.

 

[harley]

Fun city, though. And you can drink on the street!

Wait! You can't do that everywhere? Oops.

 

[Sarah in SC]

They'll lock you up in Charleston! Unfortunately...but Savannah is our rowdy Georgia cousin!

 

[HadEnuff]

well, I've partied in Charleston, and I've partied in Nawlins, so I'm looking forward to partying in Savannah.

 

[Helen]

I read that the thing to do is to use websites like Hotels.com to narrow your hotel choices. Then call the hotel(s) directly and tell them you want a great "deal". They often give you a deal as good or better than the robo-websites. And sometimes you can negotiate a better room.

Anyway I have no personal experience with this but reading it makes it seem somewhat plausible.

- Good luck - let us know how it turns out

I had someone tell me this when I checked in to a hotel. They said hotels.com took a 30% cut of the price the customer paid and that I should call them to negotiate a price.

Frankly, I like the fact that I get a 10% discount from the list price and I like having hotels.com behind me. Every time I've spoken to hotels.com they were wonderful and their help desk appears to be US based which makes communication much easier.

 

[brett]

When we bid on Priceline or use Hotwire we always check two sites for data...betterbidding.com and biddingfortravel.com.

We find that some cities are particularly good for Priceline bidding, others not do much.

 

[Koogie]

We love Savannah. Was just there a few days ago. I second the notion that you should stay downtown in the historic district. Every thing you want to see as a "tourist" is right there and there are a lot of hotels. The Savannah suburbs (including areas right near the downtown) can be "gritty"

We stayed at a Hilton Garden Inn downtown. New, reasonable and walking distance to every thing. A lot of the chain hotels are represented in that area. If you end up staying longer, there are a few suites and longer stay type hotels that are a straight shot down Abercorn from downtown but then you'd end up having to drive back into the downtown.

As to sites, I usually look at Priceline or Hotwire, double check against Tripadvisor and then try and book directly with the hotel ! If they will match the price (99% of the time) I always feel safer and more appreciated being a direct customer.

 

[HadEnuff]

booked into Planters. I owe DW a first class vacation.

 

[brett]

On a few road trips we have had success doing this aroun 5or 6 PM.

We pre select one or two places. DW will call them while I am driving. She says that we are about a half hour out of town (which we are). She asks what their very best rate is for a room. They know that if the answer is not attractive to us we will be calling their competition. They have one chance of selling the room to us. It has been a successful tactic on a number of occasions. And once she gets a good rate we ask about the rest...breakfast, view room whatever. She is very good at it.

 

[Gone4Good]

On a few road trips we have had success doing this aroun 5or 6 PM.

We pre select one or two places. DW will call them while I am driving. She says that we are about a half hour out of town (which we are). She asks what their very best rate is for a room. They know that if the answer is not attractive to us we will be calling their competition. They have one chance of selling the room to us. It has been a successful tactic on a number of occasions. And once she gets a good rate we ask about the rest...breakfast, view room whatever. She is very good at it.

That's definitely a successful strategy in places you can count on to have lots of available rooms. But you never know when the annual falconers convention is in town, so it's not a strategy completely without risk.

If you're just staying for a single night or don't really care whether you can stay in a preferred location or even your desired town, then there's limited downside. Even more so if you're driving because it vastly increases your options versus when you arrive by bus or train.

Negotiating hotel deals on the spot is a favorite tactic for budget travelers around the world. We've tried it ourselves but found that searching for rooms after a long day of busy travel just isn't for us. And we've seen far too many folks walking from hotel to hotel looking for a room to think that the potential downsides aren't very real.

 

[audreyh1]

On a road trip, one of us is usually on the iPad in the afternoon getting rates for rooms at possible stops, and thereby pick our overnight destination. But we don't usually commit until we arrive - i.e. don't bother making a reservation over the phone.

 

[calmloki]

We are suckers for IHG Pointbreaks rooms. *5,000* points for a room. Completed filling out 94 card entries for a recent IHG promotion which netted us 50,500 points and a $50 Mastercard gift card; which covered the postage and envelopes and cards. Did take the two of us about 3 hours to fill out all the cards and address the envelopes.

The Pointbreaks rooms are often in odd locations, but that works for us. Silver City NM had the best Mimbres pottery collection in the world. El Centro Ca will get us into the El Centro area for the 8:30AM bus tour of the Salton Sea restoration and energy initiative.

 

[brett]

We belong to the Accor Hoteks group club. Not for the points because they expire well before we have enough to use. It costs nothing to join.

But quite often Accor will run specials in four/five star hotels. Last year we prepaid for a 4/5 star in Bangkok. We had to prepay for three nights -$82 CAD per night including a fabulous buffer breakfast. Their IBIS specials in Europe are often very good. We have taken advantage of them several times.

 

[tulak]

Based on Gone4Good's feedback on this thread, I decided to try out hotels.com to see how I liked their rewards program. We finished a trip to Asia last week which I booked on hotels.com. The trip was for 8 nights, but we book two rooms so we had a total of 16 nights (we're a family of four). This earned us one free night.

Over the weekend I booked our hotels rooms for Europe this summer. I was able to use the one free night for one of our bookings and it was easy to redeem. The hard part is trying to get the per night hotel room cost that you are booking to be close to the average of the 10 that you previously booked. For example, our average was around $120/night and the hotel that I booked cost $110. I lost out on a potential $10. But that's only a concern if you're trying to maximize. For me, close enough. Scratch that. I just read their rules and "You can redeem your free night for a night of greater value and pay the difference." I'll have to remember that next time.

For Paris, I was going to use Chase Sapphire points. This is where I hit an issue, which made me wonder how valuable Chase Sapphire points are compared to the hotels.com rewards program.

I went to the Ultimate Rewards website to find a hotel in Paris. Their website isn't that great, but I eventually narrowed it down to a place that I liked. It came out to 11,906 points per night. Two rooms, five nights, a total of 119,060 points or $1,190.60. The problem is that when I tried to book it, the website came back saying the hotel was unavailable. I played around with this for a while, but it was gone (it's back today however). I realize inventories change, but it took me a while to find a location/hotel that I liked and I didn't want to go through the search process again and I didn't want to wait and hope that it might show up again. So I spent some time comparing how much it would cost if I booked it through hotels.com

On hotels.com the same booking costs $1,272.60. That's $82 more than using points. If I book the hotel using the Chase Sapphire CC I get two points for each of those dollars spent, which if I redeem as cash is $25.45. Now it's only $56.55 more. Plus, I get a free booking on hotels.com worth $115.69. So if my analysis here is correct, I'm ahead about $60 by booking the hotel through hotels.com instead of using my Sapphire points. Easy choice. I booked the hotel on hotels.com.

Looks to me like hotels.com is a winner. Mucho thanks to Gone4Good for pointing this out, otherwise I wouldn't have given it a shot. It's already saved me over $100 and after this summer I'll have another few hundred dollars worth of nights to redeem.

Now I need to figure out how I'm going to use the Sapphire points. I'll probably leave them for now and look to transfer them to an airline loyalty program when booking flights. Any other ideas?

 

[walkinwood]

For a night or two in the US or in a popular area, we'll use hotwire. Betterbidding.com will often be right about the hotel you'll get.

For longer stays or if we want to be in a specific location, we scout out on tripadvisor and then try getting a better price on other sites including the hotel site.

Of late, we've found good deals through AARP.

Tripadvisor will route you through one of a number of sites (hotels.com, priceline, etc.), so check which site they're sending you to and if they have a good reputation.

If we are sure of the date, we'll prepay if that is an option.

We've also been using airbnb a lot if the stay is for 3+ days and part of a longer trip. We always opt for the full apartment.