As most of you know Paul and I spent a wonderful long weekend in Atlanta just over a week ago. We had a lot of fun on our child free weekend and I thought I would devote a couple of posts to sharing some of things we did, where we ate and where we stayed while in Atlanta, as well as any money saving tips we used while on our vacation.
The reason we chose to go to Atlanta is because it is relatively close, we wanted to shop at Ikea and Trader Joe's - both of which we don't have in our own city, and from a brief day trip a couple years ago we already knew we liked the city.
When it comes to choosing a hotel we're usually die-hard Courtyard Marriot fans. We've always been very pleased with the service, had clean rooms, often been upgraded for free and we've just grown an attachment to that hotel chain.
This time around we decided to try something a little bit different. We waited until a few days before our trip and then checked www.hotwire.com for prices - we were excited to find great deals on 3 and 4 star hotels and opted for a 4 star hotel at the rate of $55 a night - which included a Saturday night!
The challenge with Hotwire is you don't actually know which hotel you are going to get until you have paid - they tell you the price, the star rating, trip advisers star rating and the general location within the city.
Even though we could have gotten a 3 star for quite a bit less we opted for the 4 star since we'd never tried this before. Next time I think we will go for the 3 or 3.5 star ratings - both to save money and because the 3 star hotels are still nice hotels - the Double Tree and Hilton are examples of their 3 and 3.5 star rated hotels.
The hotel we ended up at was the Westin. The room we got for $55 a night was regularly slightly over $200 a night! The hotel was beautiful, with beautiful views, and we were really pleased with it.
No matter where you are visiting I would recommend giving hotwire.com a try before booking elsewhere. We kind of liked the adventure of not knowing the hotel name until after we had paid!
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2 comments:
I just got finished booking with hotwire.com for the first time also. We have two events in or near Toronto this weekend and decided to stay Saturday night. We got a 4 star hotel for $65. My favourite part is that we paid through Paypal. We do a lot of online transactions, and had the money in our account, and it just worked out perfectly!
I will definitely be using hotwire again!
Hotwire is awesome, we use it every time. Well, them or Priceline anyway. Last time we went to Denver and stayed at DoubleTree for $40 a night!
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