OK… so, you may be a little envious when reading this – but I saved so much money I figured I had to share. While cruising around the web to plan a summer vacation in Hawaii (yeah, that’s where the envy may come in), I was directed to a really great site for travel deals: Hotwire.com.

Hotwire is a (free!) service that scours the web for travel deals on: hotels, flights, cruises, cars and more. It does all the searching around for the best savings so you don’t have to. The best deals are all last minute sales that need to be filled.

How It Works

Hotwire tells you everything about the service you want, except for the name of the company providing it. They tell you about the features and savings, and you find out the name of it after you pay. It sounds a bit scary, but it’s actually really exciting. This way, companies can give you super low prices without ever advertising them.

For example, you could find a 4 Star hotel with a pool, in suite kitchen and ocean view for $59/night (along with the general area), but you won’t find out the name of it until you click ‘buy’.

My story

We waited until 1 week before our trip and got big time savings (I know, so much for planning right?). Anyways, I needed to find a hotel and a rental car for a week in Kauai, Hawaii, and fast.

I checked around a few hotel websites and found the prices to be a lot steeper than I had originally imagined. Rather than shell out for a hotel I couldn’t afford, or one that had more bugs than guests, I used Hotwire. Same for the rental car.

How’d it turn out?  Well, for the car, I searched for an economy model from the Lihue Airport for 7 days. It came back with one for $14/day – that’s only $98. After deciding this was a good deal, I paid for it and found out I would be picking it up from Alamo. For curiosity’s sake I checked out the Alamo website and found the same car for $45/day! That’s $315 for the week! Yuck, right?

For the hotel, my deal was even better. I got a massive room upgrade for 70% of the original price.

Overall, hotwire saved me hundreds and hundreds of dollars… not to mention a ton of time looking for good deals.

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