Uncover the Actual Hotel Offered Through Hotwire

Hotel Strategies

Using Hotwire is a great way to save significant amounts of money on hotel rooms. On Hotwire, you are not supposed to know what hotel you are getting, until after you complete your reservation. However, it is usually possible to figure out the exact hotel you are going to get, ahead of time.

Historically, Hotwire has hidden the exact number of reviews, and only shown a range, such as "1,001 - 2,000 reviews", so that you couldn't use the number to find a definitive match via the TripAdvisor information. And they still do in their apps, and on their PC and mobile websites. But for the time being, they don't convert to a range when you view their website on many tablet based devices.

The easiest way to identify the hotel is on Hotwire itself. Let's imagine you are searching for a hotel in Chicago, the 4.5-star hotel in the Magnificent Mile zone looks interesting, and you want to determine exactly what hotel it is.

Simply make sure you are looking at "All Hotels", select just a single-zone using the Map (in this case "Magnificent Mile - Water Tower area"), filter down the hotel list to hotels that match the "Recommendation", "TripAdvisor" rating, and "Star Rating" of the mystery hotel, and sort by "Star Rating".

The list will now only include a small number of hotels, and you can easily find the hotel that has the same TripAdvisor information as the Mystery Hotel.

In this example, you would be getting the Sofitel Chicago Magnificent Mile for $79, rather than $197. If you're curious, the $95 4.5-star Boutique Hotel with the "perfect" TripAdvisor and Hotwire ratings is the Viceroy Chicago.

For cities with fewer hotels, we simply filter to hotels with decent ratings, sort the list by Star Rating, and turn on/off the different zones to quickly explore all the hotel options.

Note that if you do try to compare to information on Hotwire to TripAdvisor itself, the number of reviews on Hotwire will be slightly lower, because it is not completely up-to-date.

How to uncover the name of a hotel on Hotwire (the normal way)

If you don't have access to the right version of the Hotwire website, or Hotwire changes their tablet website UX, you can usually identify the name of the hotel, it just requires more effort.

In the following example, we are trying to figure out the identity of the mystery hotel offer that we discussed in our main Hotwire article. It turned out to the Westin Maui. But let’s see how we could have figured out what hotel it was ahead-of-time.

Determine the candidate hotels. The first step is to narrow down the list of possible hotels, based on the star rating and neighborhood. On Hotwire, if you click on the regular “Hotels” tab, next to the “Hot Rate Hotels” tab, you’ll switch over to their normal hotel listings.

Then, you can set the filters (on the left-hand side) to the star ratings and neighborhood the match the offer you are interested in:

The main part of the page will then show a list of the potential hotels you might be getting. Just be aware that it is not a true “filter”—the list will still show hotels that don’t exactly match the neighborhood or star ratings; however, the ones that do match will be at the top. Make sure you look at the neighborhood and star rating for each hotel listing to determine which of the hotels are truly candidates for the Hotwire hotel.

At this point, we’ve narrowed down the list of possible hotels to the Westin, the Sheraton, the Westin Villas, two different Marriott Ocean Clubs, the Honoa Kai, or the Ka’anapali Alii.

Open each possible hotel in its own browser tab. On a computer, you can click on each one, while holding down the <ctrl> key.
Eliminate the hotels that don’t match the price range, TripAdvisor rating, and bed type of the Hotwire hotel. When you look at the mystery hotel’s details page, you can see the TripAdvisor rating, the bed type for two-bedded rooms, the price, and the resort fee. Compare these to the information for the candidate hotels, and rule out any hotels that don’t match. As you rule out each hotel, close the corresponding tab. If it matches, keep it open.

We know that our “mystery” hotel has a crossed-out price of $324, a Trip Advisor rating of 4, over 2,000 TripAdvisor reviews, and has rooms with double-beds (and not queens). We also know that it has a resort fee of $32.

Hotwire deliberately shows a crossed-out “regular” price, and a resort fee that doesn’t exactly match their regular hotel price or the real resort fee; that would make things too easy. However, the price will be in the same ballpark, and the resort fee they display will always be a bit higher than the real resort fee. So, we are looking for a hotel with similar, but not identical prices.

Also, Hotwire treats “Condo hotels”, “Boutique hotels” and “Resort hotels” as special categories. Therefore, we can rule out the two Marriotts, the Westin Villas, and the Honua Kai—they are all Condo hotels, and their prices are too different from the crossed-out price. We can also rule out the Ka’anapali Alii for being a Condo hotel, and the lack of availability. It also can’t be the Hyatt, as they don’t have any rooms with 2 double beds.

At this point, we’ve narrowed it down to the Westin or the Sheraton. Both hotels have prices and resort fees in the right ballpark, get a 4 rating on TripAdvisor, have over 2,000 TripAdvisor reviews, and have rooms with 2 double beds.

Now look at the amenities. You want to look for any less typical amenities that are listed for the mystery hotel. In this case, Hotwire mentions pets and an airport shuttle. If you search the Westin webpage, both are mentioned. If you look at the Sheraton web page, neither are listed. Voila, we are almost certainly getting the Westin—and that is indeed the identity of the mystery hotel.

Some helpful websites

There are a handful of websites that try to help you identify Hotwire hotels. They can all be helpful, but unfortunately none of them are a completely reliable substitute to the more time-consuming approach described above.

Better Bidding is a forum where people provide information about the hotels that they wound up getting on Hotwire. They then compile a list of all the reported hotels for each “type”, “star rating”, and “location”. You can look through this list for matches—the hotel that you are likely to get will usually be listed. However, it won’t always include your hotel, the list of amenities doesn’t always exactly match, and you can’t see some of the other important clues, such as TripAdvisor information. So, while it is probably the best of these options, it isn’t totally reliable.

Hotel Deals Revealed has a list in a more useful format. However, it includes fewer of the possible hotels, because less people are reporting information. It might be easier to figure out the mystery hotel, but it also is more likely that the mystery hotel simply won’t be in the list.

Bid Goggle is a great idea. You enter your information about the hotel into their form, and they try to tell which hotel you are likely to be getting. Unfortunately, most of the times we’ve tried, it didn’t actually work.

Convenient tools for Priceline Express Deals

We generally recommend using Hotwire because they provide essential information about every hotel as part of their website. However, Priceline is also a major player in the “opaque” pricing space (in addition to their famous “name your own price” hotel program).

If you use Priceline, a Chrome browser extension called Hotel Canary works to automatically uncover the identity of each hotel.

Once you see a list of the Priceline hotel express deals, you simply press the hotel canary button. Then, when you position your mouse over each hotel, the extension will either identify the probable hotel, or give you a few different likely possibilities.