Hotel booking guide

I have obsessive compulsive disorder when it comes to saving on hotels. When I travel for work, I book 95 percent of the hotels I stay in through Priceline.com or Hotwire.com. Priceline and Hotwire may not be for everyone; there's something of a guess factor involved in doing either one because you're bidding on hotel rooms, but don't find out which hotel you're getting until after you pay non-refundable money. The only information you see is a hotel's ranking based on a five-star system.

Check Messageboards Before You Bid

But before I get ready to do any online bidding, I first check out a couple of related message boards. For Priceline, my first stop is BiddingForTravel.com to get a feel for what other people are bidding. BiddingforTravel.com is a forum where travelers help each other and share knowledge, including tips on how to bid multiple times a day. There's a similar forum for Hotwire called BetterBidding.com. It also offers a Priceline forum, but it's far from the authority on Priceline that BiddingforTravel can be.

Once I've done research on BiddingforTravel, I go to Hotwire and see what's available. While BiddingforTravel gives me a general range of price, Hotwire lets me know what they're making available for that same night. Then for the equivalent level of hotel, I bid 30 percent less on Priceline. It's like a direct math formula what I do.

So let's say I'm looking at a city, and Hotwire has a four-star hotel at $100/night, and I've seen what people are doing on BiddingforTravel, I will bid $70 as my first bid on Priceline.

With Priceline, there will be multiple hotel zones in most cities. A major metropolitan area may have eight different zones in the central part of the city and I look and see which ones I'm willing to stay in. Then I also look for other zones that don't have four-star hotels.

So I'm able to first do all the zones I want to stay in, and then all the zones I don't want to stay in that don't have four-star hotels, because I know even if I add that as an additional free rebid, I won't get that zone.

If my initial Priceline bid of $70 gets turned down, and then let's say there are six zones in the metro area and I know that BiddingforTravel says the most anybody has been paying for a four star is $90, I'll add another neighborhood and go up a few dollars each bid. Eventually, barring a sellout in that town, I'll get my room. And if I don't, I already knew that the worst I'd do is $100 on Hotwire.

Make no doubt about it, this is work and it takes time to do it. But the savings are so great.

My Clark Smart Savings

This kind of bidding the closest I get to the thrill people have in a casino! The cool thing is it never costs me any money, it only saves me money. If my bid is turned down I didn't lose any money, I just lost that round of bidding. You have to have the patience of knowing you can always come back and fight another day.

Here are examples of some of the latest deals I've landed using this strategy:

• A three-star hotel in Albequerque, New Mexico for $42/night
• A three-star hotel in Memphis for $42/night
• A three-and-a-half star hotel in Westchester County, New York for $80
• A three-and-a-half star hotel in Connecticut for $69
• A four-star hotel in Rome for $85/night (roughly 58 Euros at the time)
• A four-star hotel in San Francisco for $99
• A five-star hotel in London for $95

My experience is that most people prefer the certainty of Hotwire over the bidding process on Priceline. And if you do, it's much less hassle on Hotwire, though their rating system of stars tends to be more inflated than Priceline. When you go below three-star hotels or below, the accommodations can be a little dicey. I've found that three-and-a-half stars is the sweet spot.

When it comes to Hotwire, I have a little tip to help you figure out what hotel you might get: Select the dates you want to go; click on the "build a package" option for a rental car (even if you don't plan on renting one); and then they'll show you what hotels would come with the car rental. This trick will work about 75 percent of the time. Just remember it is non-refundable once you buy.

An Alternative for the Bid Shy

The savings you get in exchange for booking "blind" on Priceline or Hotwire can be up to 35 to 60 percent off the usual price. However, many people don't like the whole idea of the blind bidding sites. A lot of people travel for business and there's a particular site that I really like called QuikBook.com. With this discount hotel reservation site, you get access to the equivalent of corporate negotiated hotel rates at a lower price than you would normally have available to you as someone with a very small company. I've used QuikBook for both business and leisure travel and it's saved me a decent amount of money.