Hotwire (meh)

I’ve never used Priceline before.  I’ve been hearing about it for years, but never had occasion to use it.  We don’t fly, and generally when we stay in a hotel, someone else has made the arrangements.  But we were going out of town this past weekend, and we knew we wanted to stay in a hotel, so I went looking.  The first place I tried was Hotwire.  My sister and parents have used this successfully in the past, but I saw a lot of complaints online.  There were complaints about prices being higher than what the hotels advertised directly.  More significantly, though, there were a lot of complaints about the quality of the hotels being far overstated on the Hotwire site, and about the locations being inaccurate.  And since Hotwire doesn’t show you the name of the hotel until after you purchase it, you can’t really verify any of this until after the fact.

Priceline (yay!) (& Wyndham)

So I moved on to Priceline.  Priceline does show you exactly what hotel you’re purchasing, so you know what you’re getting.  We made a reservation for a particular Wyndham hotel, for what we thought was a pretty good price.  (I don’t know if my hubby would want me sharing cost details, but I will tell you that it was less than $100 for a 4-start hotel.)  We were very impressed with the hotel.  It was the nicest hotel we had ever stayed at, no contest.  Now, we’ve never been in a super-upscale hotel or anything, but let me just say that the Marriott does not compare.  We ate breakfast in their restaurant’s buffet the following morning and, while it was a bit on the pricey side, the food was fabulous. Seriously – I am not a foodie, by any stretch, but I would be if I ate food like this on a regular basis.  (If you need a fat burner after all that wonderful food, they also have a swimming pool and basketball court, but we did not make use of either on this particular trip.)  When we checked out, they actually charged us about $20 less than our reservation price.  We ended up not paying any more than we would have paid for any old chain hotel room, and we got a really fantastic room with extremely comfortable beds and bedding (and amenities created by Bath & Body Works).

So I have to say that both Priceline and Wyndham definitely worked for me!