Uncover the Actual Hotel Offered Through Hotwire

Save Money on All Your Travel Reservations, Get a Great Hotel Rate with Hotwire (and Other 'Opaque' Booking Tools)

Using Hotwire is a great way to save significant amounts of money on hotel rooms. On Hotwire, you are not supposed to know what hotel you are getting, until after you complete your reservation. However, it is usually possible to figure out the exact hotel you are going to get, before you book.

On and off over the last couple of years, Hotwire has been showing the "exact" number of TripAdvisor reviews for each of its hidden hotels, which lets you very quickly uncover the identity of the hotel. Previously, Hotwire has only shown a range for the number of reviews, such as “1000 - 2000” to avoid the ability to make a definitive match.

Sometimes, it does this only on some of the various Hotwire platforms (PC-based web, tablet-based Web, Hotwire Tablet app, mobile-web, and the Hotwire phone app). So, if exact review counts are not available when you look, you can try one of the other user interfaces and see if you get lucky.

Since Hotwire also includes regular hotel listing on their site, all you need to do to determine the name of a hidden “Hot Rate” hotel, is find the “Standard Rate” hotel with the exact same number of TripAdvisor reviews.

In our example, we are looking for 4-star resort with 7,463 reviews.

To make it easier to find the matching hotel listing, simply set all of the filters to match the hidden hotel you want to identify. In this example, we set the hotel zone to "Ka'anapali" (using the map), the Hotel class to 4 stars, the TripAdvisor recommendation to 80%+, and the TripAdvisor Rating to 4+. That narrows down the list to make it easier to find the matching hotel—the Hyatt Regency.

Another helpful approach is to filter the list to "good" hotels in a single neighborhood at a time, and then simply sort by star rating. Whenever you see an appealing mystery hotel, you can usually find the matching regular hotel listing within a few items in the list.

Note that the number of reviews for the hotel won't exactly match the actual number of reviews on TripAdvsior, because the Hotwire information is only updated periodically.

Uncovering the name of a hidden hotel on Hotwire: the harder way

Hopefully, Hotwire will continue to show exact TripAdvisor counts. But, if they go back to hiding the exact information, you can still uncover the name of the hotel. You'll just have to work a bit harder.

For this example, we'll show how this can be done using the mystery hotel offer that was discussed in our main Hotwire article. It turned out to the Westin Maui. But let’s see how we could have figured out what hotel it was ahead of time.

Determine the candidate hotels. The first step is to narrow down the list of possible hotels, based on the star rating and neighborhood. On Hotwire, if you click on the regular “Hotels” tab, next to the “Hot Rate Hotels” tab, you’ll switch over to their normal hotel listings.

Then, you can set the filters (on the left-hand side) to the star ratings and neighborhood the match the offer you are interested in:

The main part of the page will then show a list of the potential hotels you might be getting. Just be aware that it is not a true “filter”—the list will still show hotels that don’t exactly match your selected neighborhood or star ratings; however, the ones that do match will be at the top. Make sure you look at the neighborhood and star rating for each hotel to determine which of the hotels are truly candidates for the Hotwire hotel.

At this point, we’ve narrowed down the list of possible hotels to the Westin, the Sheraton, the Westin Villas, two different Marriott Ocean Clubs, the Honoa Kai, or the Ka’anapali Alii.

Open each possible hotel in its own browser tab. On a computer, you can click on each one, while holding down the <ctrl> key.
Eliminate the hotels that don’t match the price range, TripAdvisor rating, and bed type of the Hotwire hotel. When you look at the mystery hotel’s details page, you can see the TripAdvisor rating, the bed type for two-bedded rooms, the price, and the resort fee. Compare these to the information for the candidate hotels, and rule out any hotels that don’t match. As you rule out each hotel, close the corresponding tab. If it matches, keep it open.

We know that our “mystery” hotel has a crossed-out price of $324, a Trip Advisor rating of 4, over 2,000 TripAdvisor reviews, and has rooms with double-beds (and not queens). We also know that it has a resort fee of $32.

Hotwire deliberately shows a crossed-out “regular” price, and a resort fee that doesn’t exactly match their regular hotel price or the real resort fee; that would make things too easy. However, the price will be in the same ballpark, and the resort fee will always be a bit higher than the real resort fee. So, we are looking for a hotel with similar, but not identical prices.

Also, Hotwire treats “Condo hotels”, “Boutique hotels” and “Resort hotels” as special categories. Therefore, we can rule out the two Marriotts, the Westin Villas, and the Honua Kai—they are all Condo hotels, and their prices are too different from the crossed-out price. We can also rule out the Ka’anapali Alii for being a Condo hotel, and the lack of availability. It also can’t be the Hyatt, as they don’t have any rooms with 2 double beds.

At this point, we’ve narrowed it down to the Westin or the Sheraton. Both hotels have prices and resort fees in the right ballpark, get a 4 rating on TripAdvisor, have over 2,000 TripAdvisor reviews, and have rooms with 2 double beds.

Now look at the amenities. You want to look for any less typical amenities that are listed for the mystery hotel. In this case, Hotwire mentions pets and an airport shuttle. If you search the Westin webpage, both are mentioned. If you look at the Sheraton web page, neither are listed. Voila, we are almost certainly getting the Westin—and that is indeed the identity of the mystery hotel.

Some helpful websites

There are a handful of websites that try to help you identify Hotwire hotels. They can all be helpful, but unfortunately none of them are a completely reliable substitute to the more time-consuming approach described above.

Better Bidding is a forum where people provide information about the hotels that they wound up getting on Hotwire. They then compile a list of all the reported hotels for each “type”, “star rating”, and “location”. You can look through this list for matches—the hotel that you are likely to get will usually be listed. However, it won’t always include your hotel, the list of amenities doesn’t always exactly match, and you can’t see some of the other important clues, such as TripAdvisor information. So, while it is probably the best of these options, it isn’t totally reliable.

Hotel Deals Revealed has a list in a more useful format. However, it includes fewer of the possible hotels, because less people are reporting information. It might be easier to figure out the mystery hotel, but it also is more likely that the mystery hotel simply won’t be in the list.

Convenient tools for Priceline Express Deals

We generally recommend using Hotwire because they provide essential information about every hotel as part of their website. However, Priceline is also a major player in the “opaque” pricing space (in addition to their famous “name your own price” hotel program).

If you use Priceline, a Chrome browser extension called Hotel Canary works to automatically uncover the identity of each hotel.

Once you see a list of the Priceline hotel express deals, you simply press the hotel canary button. Then, when you position your mouse over each hotel, the extension will either identify the probable hotel, or give you a few different likely possibilities.