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BidFin Tells You Which Hotwire Hotel Is Which Before You Buy

We had our mind on Thanksgiving Turkey which is why we screwed up the name of BidFin in the first incarnation of this post. Everything has now been corrected and all traces of BinFin have been changed. Sorry!

A few months ago we told you about a way to definitively determine which Hotwire hotel you were looking at - cracking the bidding site's opaque listings - by using a combination of TripAdvisor and forums like BetterBidding. The loophole in TripAdvisor that made the technique possible has since been closed, so it's back to just using forums and crossing your fingers. That's less than ideal.

Now a new web application dubbed BidFin is making its way through beta, promising to automatically render Hotwire transparent. The site takes your location and dates, runs them through Hotwire, and returns a result of prices plus the hotels that they match. There's a confidence level for each guess and usually it's "high confidence." Helpful!

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