Finding the best hotel rate makes finding a cheap airfare look simple. Hotels often give different rates to a dozen different discounters, making the search for the lowest price a multi-hour Web slog.
You can cut down your search time by using Travelaxe, a free program that searches a slew of hotel sites at once, returning all the prices in a convenient and easy-to-read grid. Download Travelaxe for free at www.travelaxe.com, and don't worry -- Travelaxe is utterly spyware-free.
Travelaxe is at its best if you're looking for prices in Las Vegas; it's pretty good for other major US cities, and it's just okay for international prices. For Vegas, the program delivers results from 15 sites including hotels' own sites. The software found us a slew of bargains when we tried it for some sample trips, uncovering, for instance, an Expedia Special Rate at the Golden Nugget that slashed nearly $70 from the hotel's own price for a three-night stay.
For trips to New York, Travelaxe searches 11 sites, and thanks to the participation of Hotels.com, it's very well-represented in budget hotels. We searched for a trip to Amsterdam, Holland, though, and got only six sites -- and a search for prices in Lincoln, Nebraska only turned up four sites through Travelaxe. That'll still save you three searches.
Possibly more importantly, Travelaxe's grid display is faster, easier to use and more convenient than almost all of the sites it searches. Since it's a program, not a Web site, you can reorder the list, search for hotels and filter by price or quality much faster than you can with Web pages -- even if you're on a broadband connection. Travelaxe also shows each site's cancellation policies clearly, and if you're going to Las Vegas, it lists the dates of local conventions so you can avoid traveling at peak times.
Cutting Down the Axe
Travelaxe's Achilles heel, though, is the sites it doesn't search: most notably super-discounter Quikbook (www.quikbook.com), which we?ve written about time and again in this Newsletter. We found lower rates on Quikbook than on Travelaxe partner sites for some hotels in both New York and San Francisco: for instance, at the Frommer's-recommended Campton Place Hotel in San Francisco, Quikbook delivered $195 to Travelaxe's $217.
Travelaxe also doesn't search hotels' own sites in most cities, and many hotels post exclusive deals on their own sites. (Of course, hotels also undercut their own sites: for the discount Habitat Hotel in New York, we got a price of $85/night on the hotel's site but only $78 on Travelaxe.)
If you're not picky, Hotwire (www.hotwire.com) and Priceline (www.priceline.com) are likely to have the absolute lowest rates on three-star and four-star hotels anywhere in the US -- but you don't get to pick your hotel, just a star level and a neighborhood.
Travelaxe makes a great step in a comprehensive hotel search, saving you from searching a dozen sites separately. When you're looking for hotels, this program should always be the first thing you "axe."
Have you already discovered Travelaxe and have a comment on the experience? Tell us all about it on our Lodgings discussion. Click here to get started.
