For flexible travelers on a budget, booking a hotel on Hotwire can save you more than %50 off regular room rates.
The trick to getting a bargain on Hotwire is that you don't know which hotel you're booking until AFTER you've already paid. This may seem scary, but if you plan ahead and are smart about how you select your hotel, you can almost always end up with a great room.
Research the hotels around your destination.
Using travel sites like TripAdvisor.com, read reviews of the different hotels in and around the area you are visiting. Look into any and all hotels that are within an acceptable distance from your destination.
You can also read the reviews featured on the hotel booking sites themselves.
Usually, Hotwire only partners with major, national hotel chains like Extended Stay America, so you shouldn't have to worry too much about researching tiny, locally owned hotels.
Minimize this browser window but keep it open, as you'll reference it throughout the process.
Decide upon the specific areas in which you'd like to stay.
In most areas, Hotwire will group the available hotels by suburb, or even by sections within a city. Just enter your city's name into the "hotel" search section of the front page to see how your destination is divided by Hotwire.
The key is to select areas that don't have any (or many) unacceptable hotels. Using the travel sites you visited in the first step, see which of the hotwire-divided areas of your destination has the fewest poorly-rated hotels.
This means you might have to pick a suburd a bit outside your desired area.
Choose the number of "stars" for your hotel.
This is another way to negate your chances of ending up with an undesirable room. Again, looking over the travel review sites, see what is the least number of stars that still has an overwhelming majority of nice hotels.
In my experience, you can find simple but nice rooms at the two to two-and-a-half star level. If you're looking for more amenities, however, raise the number of stars.
Search the internet for an explanation of the different numbers of stars.
Book your room.
This is the hardest/scariest step, as you can't get a refund once you book and pay for the room.
If you've followed the above steps, however, you may almost be able to know which hotel you're booking before you actually take the final step.
Quick example: If you're looking to visit Portland, Oregon, and research area hotels, you'll notice that the suburb of Hillsboro is quite nearby and has virtually no poorly rated hotels in the two-and-one-half star range. So if you enter this into hotwire, you're almost guaranteed a nice room at a bargain price of about $45 dollars a night - half-off the usual price.
