It’s 3am, Wednesday, and I am finishing the booking of air and travel for the next 10-day assignment which begins after I finish photographing Kermit the Frog on Capitol Hill, travels to Rochester NY, then Los Angeles, then Las Vegas, then Oakland, then Los Angeles, before returning to DC. It’s an exhaustive trip, and we spent much of the day today in pre-production, packing bags to confirm to size and weight restrictions, and so forth. In Los Angeles, the client is staying in the West Hollywod area, and gave us several recommendations for where to stay. Typically, we make these calls ourselves, however, we were surely amenable to their suggestions. One of them was the Hyatt West Hollywood. I checked Orbitz (graphic above), and it was $215 a night, for this 4-star “upscale” hotel.
I decided to have a look at Priceline, to see where hotels would fall price-wise.
(Continued after the Jump)
Remarkably, by selecting 4-star, and West Hollywood as my options, I found myself and my team booked into…the Hyatt West Hollywood for $106 a night! A significant savings, to be sure! Laughably, Orbitz’s site says “lowest price guarantee”, which is clearly not the case here.In the end, this was over a 50% savings from booking with Orbitz.
I post this as a suggestion that, as the title of the entry says, “it pays to do your homework.”
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Originally published on Photo Business News & Forum on March 12, 2008. Comments are closed; this post is part of the archive.
I couldn’t agree more with your Priceline suggestion. I just booked a “Premium” Rental Car through Priceline/Hertz for $20/day vs $65 on the Hertz site. Quite the savings!
I need more depth field on that frog photo……. AP WX104 of 03/12/08. And what about those black wires?
Got Photoshop?????
Thanks for the note tho!
John
Enjoy the shower, hehehehe
The car is ok and I have to plan all the hotel arrangement for me and my assitant… Doing a homework is always fine…Sometimes I call and ask for special prices…
Just curious, as I would have imagined that the hotel invoice would be passed along to the client.