Popular discount travel site Hotwire offers great rates for hotel rooms, with the catch being that the customer doesn't know the name of the hotel until he or she has already prepaid for the stay. Several dedicated websites, however, can help consumers determine the exact lodging before they book, taking the guesswork out of the equation.
Everyone loves a great travel deal, and one of the best discount travel websites is Hotwire, which offers deeply-discounted rates on hotel rooms throughout the U.S., but with a big catch. The name of the actual hotel is not revealed until the traveller actually pulls the trigger and pays for the stay with a credit card, which cannot be refunded.
The traveler is, however, given a series of details about each hotel for consideration, including the area in which the hotel is located, the amenities provided, the star rating of the hotel, the percentage of Hotwire customers who recommend the hotel after staying there, and the Tripadvisor.com site user rating.
Using those details, several websites have emerged, which, along with input from users, can help indicate with great certainty the exact hotel being offered by Hotwire. The website hotwirehotellist.com has an easy to use interface that helps travelers determine which hotel they are booking before they commit.
To use the site, a traveler simply needs to choose the area they plan on visiting, for example, New York City. Since hotels on Hotwire are divided by area, the user then needs to select which part of New York City they wish to stay in, for example, the Madison Square Garden area. The site then lists various hotels in that section of New York in the same format as their Hotwire listings, except with each hotel name revealed at the top, along with the star rating, percentage of Hotwire users recommending the establishment, as well as the listed amenities and most recent Hotwire price per night. By matching the hotels named with the current Hotwire detail listings, the traveler can discover which hotel he or she is booking prior to charging a credit card for the stay.
The system is not foolproof, however, as sometimes, the details for two hotels may be so similar that the traveler books a different hotel than expected. Also, not every hotel in every area is in the system, so the information desired may simply be unavailable. More popular cities and hotels are more likely to be listed on the reveal sites, which also include betterbidding.com and hoteldealsrevealed.com, although the latter is not updated as frequently.
