Hotwire is a good site to use to help you secure low cost accommodations for your trip. It does not however guarantee you the best accommodations for your money. You could very well luck-out and get an awesome hotel room. There’s also a good chance that you can get a hotel room that will make you end your trip early. Still, it is hard to beat the prices so it is at least worth the try.
If you are going to attempt to find a good hotel using Hotwire, there are some things you can do to ensure that you are getting the best deal for what you are willing to pay. This will take time and patience, but a little research now will save you a great deal of heart ache later.
The first thing you need to do when using Hotwire to find a good hotel is to explore all of the hotels in the area you are planning to stay in. Google maps does an excellent job of helping you to find local hotels and it will also give you links to review for each hotel. You may have to work a little to find every hotel in the area. You should do separate searches for hotel, motel, lodging, Inn, and even do searches for certain brand name hotels like Best Western and Hilton. When the search brings up the hotels, you can click on them and read the reviews. If the reviews are overwhelmingly bad, you need to pass on that hotel. If it is very good, then you can add it to your map as a hotel you may want to stay in.
As you check off the hotels, you do not want to stay in, take note of the rating of the hotels. If the two and three star hotels for that area get consistently bad reviews, or even if one or two hotels with that rating is very bad, you will want to definitely bid on a Hotwire hotel with a 4 star rating or better.
After you have made and marked a map for your upcoming vacation that is labeled with hotels you are willing to stay in and locations that you plan to visit, you need to find out which hotel is which. Hotwire is set up to keep your hotel choice a surprise until after you pay for the room. This is how they keep the prices low. Still, no one wants to stay in the hotel that has review talking about bed bugs and roaches. You will want to make sure that such hotel results are not in the running. There are a couple of websites that will help you eliminate some of the smoke and mirrors.
Betterbidding.com is a forum website where Hotwire users post the results of their searches and the hotels they secured. It is not the easiest site to decipher as it in forum format, but between the easy click travel feature, the new calendar of wins features, and the forum that lists hotels according to the amenities they offer, you will be able to an educated guess as to which hotel is which.
If you look at tripadvisor.com you can match mystery hotels to the actual hotels by looking at the ratings and seeing if they match up.
Biddingfortravel.com is another forum based website that has a listing of previous bid winds based on amount, amenities, and the bid that was won.
Using these helpful websites and a bit of detective work, you will easily be able to find a good price on better hotel using Hotwire.com.
