HOWTO: Score a Hotel Deal on Priceline
Over at About.com's Budget Travel site there's an excellent rundown on how to score a hotel deal through Priceline. The writer wanted to stay in downtown Indianapolis for a sporting event but didn't want to pay the $140 a night he was seeing on the usual booking sites. So he checked the message boards, went to Priceline, and scored a deal for $60.47 after fees and taxes. He doesn't say which hotel he scored, but judging by what's on the BiddingForTravel board, it was the Omni Severin or the downtown Hyatt Indianapolis.
We have had our own frequent success with this method, scoring cut-rate deals on leftover rooms at Hotel President in Kansas City, Millennium St. Louis, and the Omni Shoreham in Washington, D.C. We also managed a bargain all-inclusive deal in the Bahamas by visiting the message boards before hitting Hotwire. As we showed last year, it's even possible to score an under-$200 room in Manhattan if you do it right.
If you're the type that doesn't mind paying list price for the satisfaction of knowing which hotel you're sleeping in for the night, then never mind. But if the general location and star level matter more than which chain's logo is on the building, you can save a bundle this way.

