Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Priceline.com is AWESOME!

I just needed to do a shameless plug for Priceline.com. I love it. I've booked numerous hotels through the site and have always been "wowed!" Now granted, we haven't done much traveling recently, but before kids and when both my husband and I were working, we'd actually go places. We personally got awesome hotels in places like the Marriott in Vancouver BC, some crazy big hotel in the Anaheim CA area near Disney Land, a really nice local hotel in Athens GA, a moderate room in Honolulu, some fancy digs in San Diego, a nice place in downtown Spokane WA, a HUGE Best Western in the Baltimore area, a beautiful Marriott in Hartford CT, and some more. Most I got for $100 a night or lower through Priceline.com.

Well my faith in Priceline.com just got renewed! A good high school friend of mine usually makes a yearly trip up to Cape Cod in July and we usually just drive down for a few hours to visit and come back. But I thought it would be really great to just spend the weekend down there with the kids. Then we might actually be able to walk around and see what all the fuss about Cape Cod is about.


Now if you're from the area, you know that hotels on the Cape aren't exactly cheap. So I looked up some on Hotels.com to get my price points. Yeah. It looked impossible (I wanted something at around $100 a night - that wasn't sketchy). So I went to Priceline.com, set my sites on Hyannis and Barnstable, clicked 3 and 2 1/2 stars, put in my dates, put in $100 - and out spit out a room at the Radisson in Hyannis! Wonderful!


So I checked the hotel website - the same room we got was $170. I checked Hotels.com - the same room was $170. So by "taking my chances" - I saved $70 and scored a great hotel. To further maximize the savings, I put the charge on my Discover card - which is currently giving it's members 5% back on hotel purchases.


If you have a need or desire to travel at all - consider Priceline.com! Sure, you might not know what hotel you're going to get, but if you're not particular about that stuff (like we are!) - it's a great tool! I've also gotten great prices on airfare through that site in the past. Again - you have no idea what times your flights will be or what carrier -but to save a few hundred bucks, it was always worth it to not know my times until after the fact. Sometimes it pays to not be really anal about these things in life.

2 comments:

hopeng said...

I've never tried PriceLine for hotels but once did for airline tickets. After putting in all my credit card info it would come back that my selected flights were no longer available and would give me different flights at different times at higher prices to choose from. This happened 5-6 times for the 2 days I tried it. I gave up and ended up buying tickets cheaper elsewhere.

Anonymous said...

Hey Becky! I love Priceline.com too. They have a new feature that we used in DC. You can extend your hotel stay if there is availability if you go online from the business center from the hotel!!! Have fun!