How to Use Hotwire for Booking Hotels

In my post about , I described how I reserved my hotel room through Hotwire, and how Hotwire is a bit of a gamble.

So how does Hotwire work? Their gimmick is that you can book a room at a deeply discounted rate, but you don’t find out which one you’ve booked until after you pay – and the payment is non-refundable and can only be altered in very limited ways. The reasoning is that hotels don’t want people to know that their rooms are available on Hotwire; if they did, no one would ever pay full price.

Tips for using Hotwire

1. Use Hotwire if the exact hotel or location isn’t that important to you.
2. Only use Hotwire if you’re not gambling-averse.
3. If Hotwire shows the city as divided into different areas, do some research to figure out where you want to be. Is the local transportation good? Is it considered a safe area? If you know someone in the city you’re planning to visit, ask them.
4. Double check that you’ve entered your information correctly: the dates you want to stay, the number of rooms and the number of people. Remember that Hotwire bookings are non-refundable!
5. Generally more stars means higher prices, but not always. Check a level higher than you would usually book. I only just learned from my experience in Luxembourg that I should check five-star places as well.
6. If you can, click on the question “What hotel will I get?” If you don’t like all three hotels, try refreshing the page to see if the choices change.
7. When you use Hotwire, you’ll get an e-mail after your trip asking you to review the hotel. Hotwire uses these reviews to come up with an overall guest rating out of 5 for each hotel. Be wary of a hotel that has a low rating, no matter how many stars it has. Below Hotwire’s rating is the TripAdvisor rating. In parentheses after the TripAdvisor rating is a number, which is the number of reviews the percentage is based on.
8. Factor in transportation costs. If you would have to take a taxi every day from a hotel that’s too far away, you’d be better off booking a nearer hotel on another website like booking.com, or through the hotel itself. If there’s a fast and relatively cost-efficient public transportation system, then the area doesn’t matter as much.
9. You can book quite far in advance on Hotwire. I experimented once with booking a hotel in Berlin: comparing a Thursday night stay in August, September and October. The best deal with my search criteria was €55 a room in a four-star hotel, and that price was the same each month. However, the more last-minute you book, the fewer choices you’ll have, if any.

How Hotwire works

Let’s look at the process I went through to book a couple of nights in Prague. I started on the home page by just typing in the city name, the dates I’m looking for, and the number of people traveling.

Once I clicked enter, I landed on this screen. On the right is a map of Prague, with light green areas marked on it. Hotwire divides cities into districts so that you can search for a hotel in a particular district.

On the left are some hotel offers, but I wasn’t ready yet to choose one. I needed to narrow down the list first.

Its default setting is what Hotwire calls the “best match.” I disagree. What they call the “best match” is often not the cheapest. Using the little pull-down menu at the top, I ordered my results by price: lowest to highest, as you can see in the screenshot below.

I also wanted to sift out the lower-end hotels. A word of advice, if you are going to use Hotwire, always include higher star levels than you normally would consider. Sometimes, for example, you can get a four-star hotel for a three-star price. You can choose your star levels in one of the pull-down menus at the top. In this example, I’ve checked 4 and 5-star hotels:

I also like to choose some amenities that I consider non-negotiable: I always want free WiFi and I often choose breakfast included and/or free parking, if I’m arriving by car. Again, you can make these choices in one of the pull-down menus at the top of the screen.

All of this sorting and filtering narrowed down my choices, which is fine in a big city like Prague. However, I could also filter it even more.

Clicking on one or more zones on the map turns them darker green. In the screenshot below, you can see how I narrowed my search to one zone: Old Town.

The left side of the screen now shows only hotels with 4 or 5 stars, with free WiFi, with availability on my chosen dates, and located in Old Town Prague. They’re listed in order from cheapest to most expensive.

If you’re going to use Hotwire, here’s the link.

Hotwire’s “hot rates”

As you can see in the screenshot above, some hotels are described as “hot rate.” These are the ones that Hotwire keeps secret until you book them. Mixed in with the “hot rate” hotels are others that are listed by name.

Even for the “hot rate” hotels you might not be taking much of a risk. Notice the little question under the “hot rate” listing: “What hotel will I get?” If you click on that, sometimes (not always) it will show you three possible hotels, as in the screenshot below:

In this screen I’ve expanded the search to two zones rather than one, but otherwise it’s the same as the screenshots above. I’ve clicked on “What hotel will I get?” and it shows me three different ones. If I book this “hot rate” hotel, I’m guaranteed a room in one of these three hotels.

So in this case I’ve found a 4-star hotel for $54 a night in the vicinity of Prague Castle. The one above that is $51 a night in Old Town.

This is a great deal for the center of Prague. I could find something even cheaper if I a) tried other parts of the city or b) went for fewer stars.

Sometimes, when I’m not feeling so sure about the three hotels that Hotwire hints at, I go ahead and look the three hotels up online. If they all seem fine, I go ahead and book by clicking on that hotel.

Here’s another trick I just figured out recently. If you refresh the page in your browser and then click again on “What hotel will I get?”, the list of hotels will change.

So let’s say I choose the $51 hotel. It’s a four-star in Old Town Prague. It has free internet and I can read a whole list of its other amenities: whether there’s a restaurant or a gym or mini-fridges or whatever. It will give me a choice of bed and room types, but it will not tell me what hotel it is until I pay.

Hotwire’s rating system

On the screens I’ve included above, Hotwire gives a general rating for each hotel out of five. I’m very suspicious of any hotel that rates under 4.0, but that’s your call.

It also includes the TripAdvisor rating and how many reviews it is based on. If a hotel has a rating of 5.0, but that’s based on only one review, you’re taking a gamble.

You can find out more about each hotel’s rating once you click on the hotel. Scroll down and you’ll see a chart where Hotwire’s rating is more detailed:

The rest of the process works like any hotel booking engine. Make your choice and work through the series of screens asking your information and processing your payment. Once you’ve paid, it’ll let you know which hotel you got.

A warning: if your plans change, you’re out of luck! These reservations are non-refundable and only changeable to the extent that you can add days, but not change the dates.

With a little fancy keyboard work before you click “book now” on Hotwire, you can prevent both overpaying and that sinking feeling when you get stuck with a hotel room, car rental company, or flight schedule that is so not what you had in mind. Let BT be your guide:

1. First, make a beeline for non-Hotwire-affiliated data-collecting sites to see what everyone else has been booking.

Those sites help predict what hotel you’ll get and share specifics about recent Hotwire deals, including hotel names and prices, car rental company and rate information, and flight details (layovers, stops, airlines, etc.). Know, however, that they’re not gospel: Geographic boundaries are often redrawn, and offerings change.

Even Hotwire itself is telling users up front what hotels previous Hot Deal takers have nabbed: For example, we searched for a three-star hotel in Reykjavík, Iceland, for five nights in March, found one for $72 per night, clicked on it, and a blue flag popped up, saying, “Book soon! The last person got the Hótel Leifur Eiríksson.” The Leifur Eiríksson is a small, basic boutique hotel smack in the middle of the city, with views of Hallgrímskirkja church. Booked through the hotel’s site, the daily rate would have been $126; Hotels.com showed $114. That’s almost a 37 percent discount for a well-rated, centrally located crash pad, assuming that’s the hotel you do end up with. The takeaway: Don’t feel guilty about DIY-ing your own research; everyone is doing it.

2. Google the amenities to guess opaque hotel choices.

“Although Hotwire does not reveal the name of a hotel before booking, it does provide a lot of information about a hotel, such as vicinity, hotel amenities, resort fee (if applicable), hotel class, and TripAdvisor rating,” Greencorn says. “This information acts like a fingerprint, describing unique characteristics of a hotel. It is fairly simple to use other sources—Google Maps, TripAdvisor, Resort Fee Checker, etc.—to find hotels that fit this description. It’s not perfect, but I can usually narrow it down to two or three likely hotels before pulling the trigger on a purchase.”

3. Download the mobile app! The last-minute hotel deals are the best ones.

Above all, Hotwire considers its last-minute hotel savings—including day-of arrival—to be significantly better than Priceline’s. Hotwire’s in-house experts say that of the people who book their travel on Hotwire’s free mobile app, two-thirds of them book on the same day. It’s completely worth a shot to download the app and scan the inventory, even—or especially!—if you happen to be idling in the parking lot, deciding which nearby hotel to choose. Plus, Hotwire just updated its iPad and iPhone app to include car rentals and launched car rental bookings for Android too.

4. Create your own Hotwire vs. Priceline cage match.

This might not be the nicest thing to do, but it’s one strategy: “Many travelers use Hotwire to find out opaque pricing, then see if they can get a better deal on Priceline’s Name Your Own Price system,” Greencorn says. “For example, say I see a five-star Las Vegas Strip hotel for $100 on Hotwire. Why not bid on Priceline and see if you can do better?”

In that same vein, he says, you can use Hotwire in conjunction with Priceline Express Deals to get the best price. Glance at that section of Priceline before you buy on Hotwire, since Priceline Express Deals follows the same transaction model.

5. Take advantage of a little-known Hotwire tool to plan your trip around the best rates and weather.

Not everyone knows about the site’s TripStarter feature, but if you type in your destination and the airport you’re flying from, it quickly tells you when flights and hotel rates have historically been the cheapest, based on Hotwire searches, along with average temps and rainfall. For example: We found that flights from Chicago to Orlando usually hit rock bottom (around $200 or less) in late April, early September, and early December, and average hotel rates dip to around $85 in early September as well. The beginning of the school year might not be an ideal time to take the kids, but for an adult getaway that will more or less let you have the theme parks to yourself, you can’t beat the prices and the weather—the high is 90 degrees, cooler than June, July, and August.

6. Be realistic about what your hotel needs are, then book accordingly.

Are you traveling to a major metro area on a solo work trip that will leave you with little free time? Then you probably don’t need a leisure hotel famous for its package spa treatments and activities for children. In cases like these, a typical four-star hotel in the city center will do, which is where sites like Hotwire excel, says Tim Leffel, author of Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune.

“Unless you’re racking up lots of loyalty points, does it really matter if you’re in a Hyatt, Marriott, Hilton, or Sheraton?” he says. “If you’re going to catch eight hours of sleep at an airport hotel before a flight, does it really matter which three-star airport hotel with a shuttle you’re in? You’re just going to sleep, shower, and leave anyway.”

That said, even if you’re craving a true vacation, you can still make out like a bandit, provided you manage expectations and are specific about what’s important to you, Leffel says: “I have used Hotwire for a last-minute all-inclusive vacation in the Bahamas. It was a three-night getaway, and we didn’t much care where we stayed as long as it was on the beach.”

7. Use Hotwire for car rentals if nothing else.

If any degree of hotel or flight uncertainty freaks you out, you can still get a deep discount on auto rentals. Travel expert John DiScala, a.k.a. Johnny Jet, told us that he usually uses Priceline for its across-the-board savings, but recently, he’s seen Hotwire’s car rental prices plummet to what he calls “really” good rates.