Charleston Hotel Success on Priceline

Posted on February 15, 2011 5 Comments

Instead of hitting the gym last night, I hit up the web to book a hotel for my upcoming weekend in Charleston. I’m taking my man-friend to celebrate him FINALLY finishing law school and taking the bar exam (which he takes in SEVEN DAYS). Poor dude’s been spending 24 hours a day in this apartment since November. First he was finishing up final papers, then he had final exams, then, one day after his last final exam he started his bar prep class. I would go stir crazy if I was stuck here as long as he’s been.

I thought we should at least take a weekend to celebrate this milestone accomplishment somewhere warmer than Chicago, preferably somewhere with an ocean view. I first thought of San Diego, but the flights were expensive, so I ended up booking Charleston on Southwest Airlines for something like $200 round trip per ticket. I’ve been to Charleston several times for work and love it. Plus, I found out you can bike, kayak, and hike there in state parks and on the beaches and islands, so that’s where we’re headed.

Sniffing out a hotel deal is fairly standard practice for me. We travel a lot, and we usually try to stay in rooms under $135 per night. Which is really easy to find just about anywhere in the US. But I travel too much to stay in “rustic,” “cozy,” or plain dumpy rooms unless I’m going to the middle of nowhere and I’m mentally prepared for it. For a trip like this, where we’re going for a relaxing weekend getaway, I prefer feather beds, pools, hot tubs, and clean private bathrooms. With a great location. And heat. I don’t plan to do much else besides sleep in the room because we’ll likely be out all day long, but I want to sleep comfortably when I’m there. I don’t want to be scared of the sheets.

For booking, we use a combination of hotels.com, hotwire.com, priceline.com, orbitz.com and kayak.com. The results have been hit or miss. Sometimes we get a fabulous place like the Alpine House in Jackson Hole, WY, while other times you end up in a crappy room that faces a brick wall at a random hotel in San Francisco because your original hotel overbooked. We’ve stayed in cabins, cottages, hotels, inns, B&Bs, condos, and at resorts. I’m open to them all. I’ve recently started using Hotwire because we discovered that we can intelligently bid on hotels we want using the Better Bidding website while also comparing Hotwire’s stars and amenities with those of nearby hotels. We’ve discovered we can almost always narrow a city down to one or two hotels we want and secure them for sometimes 50 percent cheaper than what’s listed on Orbitz. It felt like a slot machine the first time we did it; now that we know what we’re doing, it’s a little less exciting. Just a little.

Last night I went one step further and used Priceline’s “Name Your Price” function. I knew which hotel I was bidding on for Charleston – there is only one four star hotel in the specific area I wanted.  Better Bidding seemed to confirm my theory and even noted prices for people who had recently secured rooms at the hotel, so I had a starting point.

Based on my intel (which proved to be flawed), I began bidding on my four-star hotel in the Mount Pleasant/Isle of Palms area at $65 and was promptly rejected. I was also rejected at $75, $85, and $95. (The beauty here is that if you bid too low, so what? You won’t know until you ask.) Priceline suggested I try $110 per night, probably because I wasn’t getting anywhere with my other bids. I did, and the hotel accepted. I was impressed because the same hotel was also going for $140 and up on Priceline, and similar rooms went all the way to $250 on its own website.

So where are we staying? At Wild Dunes Resort Hotel on the Isle of Palms. It’s kind of resort-y, which is different for us, but it’s on the beach and it has a pool and you can rent bikes and it looks fairly convenient to go into downtown Charleston by car and have all sorts of charming and historic adventures. The beds look comfy, the online reviews are great, and I’m thrilled I got a steal for us. And better yet, I’ve had my first success with name-your-own-price hotel bidding. Which is almost as exciting as the vacation itself.

The trip’s not for a few weeks, but now the fun part comes in: I get to start looking at activities, restaurants, and locations we’d like to see. This warm weather daydreaming will at least get me through these last few weeks of winter. Then, it’s on to 65 degrees, sunshine, and sandy beaches.  Charleston, here I come.

Category: Life
   Tags: Travel

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