It pays to shop around for the
best flight and hotel deals online.
Priceline (http://priceline.com)
advertises itself as the place to get cheap flights. I don’t know about
you, but my travel, mostly business, isn’t flexible enough that I can leavesometimebetween 5 am and
midnight. You’d have to plan on a day to get to your destination and a day to
get back, a poor use of your time.
But for hotels, I have found
Priceline a way to get a better deal than just going to a standard travel
website. The negative is you don’t know what hotel you are going to stay at
until you “win” your bid. And you don’t get any hotel loyalty points. But very
often you can get a decent room for half the conference rate.
The “trick” is knowing what to bid. That’s where the power ofWeb 2.0comes in. There are two websites where users post their winning bids, which
give you an indication of what various rooms are going for. They also have
lists of the hotels you’d get if you win.
So before heading over to
Priceline, go tohttp://www.biddingfortravel.com
and/orhttp://www.betterbidding.com.
The other excess inventory site
is Hotwire (http://hotwire.com). Like Priceline you don’t
know what hotel you’ll get until you book it (although the betterbidding.com has
lists of possible hotels). But instead of you bidding, they just show you what
the cost will be.
Sometimes I get a better deal
on Priceline, sometimes on Hotwire and sometimes a regular site like
Hotels.com. It pays to shop around.