Hotwire Hotel: 3* Philadelphia (Mt Laurel) Hyatt Place

[timelord]

Hyatt Place in Mount Laurel, NJ is already on your list. $59 per night, fees etc. $65.95 for a total of $478.95.

Amenities were complementary breakfast, fitness center, pool, business center, and high speed internet (exactly as described elsewhere on this site).

Cheapest rate online was $91 (government rate, for which I qualify and before finding this site, would get). or $152 for AAA and Senior, or $161 for pre-pay.

Did not try Priceline since they have 5 hotels in the Mount Laurel area with the same star rating, and I really preferred to go to Hyatt Place (or maybe Doubletree, but not the others in the Priceline list).

Note that Mount Laurel and Cherry Hill NJ are suburbs of Philadelphia, so if you're searching for these cities on Hotwire or the web, you may get more hits searching for Philadelphia.

[timelord]

There's a couple of threads from 2004 that already talk about this topic (search for "firefox" in the General Hotwire Tips forum). Bottom line is, Hotwire seems to vary the price slightly (over time, over browsers, and over the locality searched) to increase their opacity. The following is my 2 cents worth.

So I got my room with Hotwire (Mount Laurel NJ, $59 at Hyatt Place, 8/17/08 - 8/24/08) using FF. Just before clicking the "Book It!" button, I started up IE and did the exact same Hotwire search to double check something (I used a different browser since FF may have set cookies). I was a little surprised to see the price at $64, and I was reasonably sure that this was the same hotel. So I went ahead and booked it at $59 per night and did the Hotwire search again in FF. It was $59. I did it again in IE. It was $64.

And to throw yet another monkey wrench into it, when I searched for Mount Laurel, NJ in Hotwire, the prices were slightly higher ($62 in FF, $64 in IE). If I instead searched in Bensalem, PA, Hotwire returned (as one of many choices) what appeared to be the same hotel in Mount Laurel, NJ (it's only 12.5 miles away across the river). But the prices for the Mount Laurel hotel were less in the Bensalem search ($59 in FF, $63 in IE). This also probably has something to do with opacity.

So, for a 7 night stay, I saved $35 by using FF and searching for a New Jersey hotel in Pennsylvania. I did not check the Hotwire fees to see if they were calculated differently in each case (oops; maybe I should have). Your mileage may vary.

[thereuare]

Welcome to BetterBidding!

Congratulations on your success... a very nice deal and glad to see you were able to successfully target the hotel you were hoping for.

As discussed elsewhere on the board HOTWIRE uses a variable mark-up so the price can go up or down from one search to antoher. There has not been any evidence to suggest one browser is cheaper than the other (as users have experienced both), but rather it's the variable mark-up affecting the price.

Thank you for sharing your results with the board and for using our HOTWIRE link to begin your purchase.

Enjoy your stay.

PS- for those that try two browsers, PLEASE access HOTWIRE thru our link each time (for each browser) since we will likely not get credit if you make the purchase in the browser where you didn't use our link. Thanks.