It was recently announced that members of the United Airlines Mileage Plus program can use their mile points to get Hotwire hotel rooms. Is this a good deal for members or should you use your points for flights instead? This is the question I wanted to answer.
How Hotwire Works: First a quick overview of Hotwire’s unpublished hotels. With Hotwire, you don’t know the name of the hotel until after you bid (that is, unless you use the Hotwire hotel lists to match up amenities to reveal the name of the hotel). All you know about the hotel star rating, general vacinity, and the hotel amenities.
United Points for Hotwire Hotels: Now, instead of using cash to book your Hotwire hotel, you can use United miles. My instincts tell me that generally, using points to buy 3rd party goods (whether it’s a hotel room or other) is not a good thing. There’s just too many players all wanting a piece of the pie. But I’m a numbers kind of guy, so I decided to put this to the test. My objective, take a few Hotwire offerings on United and see how many points were required to purchase a hotel. Then compare the same hotel to what you would have paid on Hotwire straight up. From this, you’d be able to deduce a price per point for Hotwire hotels purchased with United points.
Travelers to Hawaii should check out Priceline if they’re going to be staying at a hotel. I’m currently spending some time in Waikiki and here in part to make it easier to help travelers navigate their way through bidding on hotels in Hawaii.
In Oahu, there’s really only 3 main areas around Oahu: North Shore, Ko Olina, Honolulu and Waikiki.
North Shore: If you see a hotel in this area, it’s almost certainly the Turtle Bay Resort. It doesn’t come up often on Priceline so if you see this hotel during your travels, nab it quickly.
Ko Olina: This is another area on Oahu that doesn’t have a lot of hotels, so it’s easy to identify your hotel before you bid. Just look for the “resort” hotel and it’s more than likely to be the JW Marriott Ihilani Resort. See the Priceline Oahu hotel list.
Thanks to a software developer friend, I added some changes to the Hotwire and Priceline hotel lists. As you probably know, HotelDealsRevealed is a great way to get help when bidding for travel, and in particular, hotels. For Priceline, the hotel lists are particularly helpful when trying to figure out what hotel you might get. […]
This is a video recently posted on Youtube to provide an overview of how to use Priceline hotel lists when bidding on Priceline hotels.
Youtube video on how to identify your hotel on Hotwire before you purchase. This video walks users through an example of booking a hotel in Las Vegas.