We decided to treat ourselves to a little staycation on Black Friday this past year and visit a hotel. We had tons of options… we thought about going over to the peninsula for a couple days, or maybe going downtown for a night. I checked out some deals, but ended up booking a 1-night stay via a Hotwire Hot Rate, which we had never done before!
In general, I believe in booking directly with the hotel/venue/whatever. I feel like you get better service and it allows you to generate reward points and such. However, the hotwire Hot Rates have always been interesting to me because they’re so cheap! How are they so cheap? These deals are actually booked “blind”. This means that you don’t get to know the name of the hotel before you book it. They tell you the general area, the hotel rating, along with a list of amenities, but that’s it! If you’re picky like me, this can be scary. I usually hem and haw over if I should “just do it” but end up not.
However, this time was different! That’s because even though it was a blind rate, I was 99.9% sure that I knew what hotel it was before I booked! But how did I know what hotel we would get in this blind rate? Let me explain…
Booking the Hotwire Hot Rate
We were looking at hotels in downtown Seattle. We’re local to the Seattle area and I have a pretty good idea of the hotel offerings in the city. I actually visited many of them when searching for a venue for our wedding! So when I filtered the Hotwire Hot Rates by location and 4.5+ stars, I saw something similar to the following listening and knew instantly what hotel I would be booking if I took this deal: Loews Hotel 1000!
While you can’t guarantee it, there are a few clues in the listing as to what hotel we would be getting. In this case, after putting all those clues together, I felt confident that I had figured it out! Here is what I noticed:
At the top of the listing it lets you click the picture to view a photo of the actual hotel. I coveted the Hotel 1000 rooms when we looked at it for our wedding, so I instantly recognized the room. And since the listing noted that the photos were for the actual hotel, I felt very safe that this would in fact be Hotel 1000. Note that not all listings show actual photos. Some listings only show an example photo of the type of room you can expect. In those cases, you really can’t know, so watch out for the notation!
I also noticed that below the main listing info, it literally states that the last person to book this deal got Loews Hotel 1000. This can obviously change between buyers, but considering the information I gained from looking at the photo, this sealed the deal! I knew that I would stay at Hotel 1000 if I booked this rate. Note that this isn’t available on every listing, but it is very common.
Now, there is one big thing I check before booking third party: Always check the pricing on the hotel website! Is this even a discount?
Comparing your rate
This rate was listed at $124, but actually came out to $159.43 after taxes, PLUS an additional $20 resort fee to be paid at checkout to the hotel directly. So, $179.43 total.
My next step was to look up the rate on the Hotel 1000 website. Since I didn’t know exactly which room I was getting, I assumed the cheapest room in order to provide the most conservative price comparison. In this case, that would be the Deluxe King Room for $235 a night. I continued through the booking to get the final price. I clicked on the price breakdown to the get details and saw that the final price was $293.72 (including that resort fee). In other words, we would save $114.29 by booking through Hotwire – a 38% savings!
Often times I would call the hotel and see if they could match the rate offered on a third-party site. I didn’t feel comfortable doing that in this case since it was a blind rate. In retrospect, I should have tried! Worst case scenario, they say no and I still book through Hotwire! That said, I did call 2 days before our stay and ask if I could get a room with water view. Since this is Covid times and the hotel seemed pretty under booked, they were able to upgrade me from a city-view to a water-view for free!
So… conclusion, will I book a Hotwire Hot Rate again? I’m definitely open to it! This was a great deal, and our stay was really top-notch. However, I would probably look only for situations like this where I know exactly which hotel I would end up with. What can I say… I’m a control freak!
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