How To Save Money When Booking A Hotel Using An Opaque Site

How can I save money when booking a hotel using an opaque site?

There's several ways to save money using opaque sites. One is to make sure you do your homework before you start bidding for the room. There's a site called Bidding for Travel that lets its users know what hotels you're most likely to get. For example, if you're trying to use it to get a four star hotel in San Francisco in a certain area, it will tell you what hotels generally come up in that particular opaque site bid. Last year I was trying to get a hotel in San Francisco and I wanted one that was fairly near the ball park. I put in those criteria and I ended up getting a very nice hotel, a four star hotel for $79 a night, so it was a real deal. I've also used opaque sites to get mid-price hotels and that's a little bit trickier because you don't always know what you're getting and they're not necessarily in the best part of town. For high end hotels I think opaque sites work great.