7 steps to a cheaper hotel room

Websites and wrangling can mean steep price cuts, Seth Kugel from the New York Times News Service reports.

There are so many ways to wrangle deals on hotel rooms these days that no matter how great a bargain you find, it is not uncommon to worry you missed a better one.

The most obvious method to suss out savings is to explore the pricing and inventory differences among standard booking sites like Hotels.com and Orbitz.com. But dig a little deeper and there are countless ways to find "unpublished" rates, typically on excess rooms hoteliers think they won't be able to sell at full or even publicly discounted prices.

I designed a five-step process (with a two-step bonus round) and tested it out by planning an imaginary four-night trip to Paris over Labor Day weekend.

This guide, of course, is for budget travelers. If you are looking for a decent, well-located room - maybe even one with a little style - this system should come close to finding you the best deal possible.

1. The lay of the land

Log on to a regular old online booking site, plug in your dates, adjust the filters - especially ones that involve cost and location - and browse through your choices.

Of course, these sites are very different. Orbitz, for example, is so inflexible that there is not even a filter for price. Yet I couldn't ignore its discount code that claims to knock 10 percent hotel rooms - and to my surprise, actually worked almost every time.

I had always found Booking.com to have a wider array of budget choices. Hotels.com offered the best filtering experience, using sliding scales that allowed me to choose a precise upper limit for price ($110 per day) and a minimum user rating (2.5 of 5).

I ended up with a couple options as a baseline: the Pavillon Nation, $500 through Booking.com, which I got down to $480 using Orbitz's higher price but with the 10 percent code; and the Hotel Audran in Montmartre, highly rated and $440.

2. Search again

The same room at the Pavillon Nation was available for $382 through getaroom.com; no one could beat Hotels.com's price for the Audran.

Then do your whole search over on other metasearch sites.

I spent the most time on Hipmunk, adding easy-to-use filters and then having it order hotels by "Ecstasy", its mysterious but useful algorithm. The No 1 choice was quite appealing and I added it to the list: the fairly central and well-rated Element Hotel for $405.

Trivago's main advantage is that it searches about 200 booking sites, meaning it will quite frequently find prices lower than the others.

3. Seek hidden rates

Getaroom.com. offers fast-expiring flash deals and rooms at "hotels within hotels". But things get weird when the site urges you to "call for secret unpublished rates!" (So 20th century!)

I plugged in my Paris dates, and getaroom.com revealed a flash deal ("Ends in three hours!") at the nice-looking, decently reviewed Villa Lutce Port Royal in Paris, four nights for $450. And then, what the heck, I called the toll-free number. And what do you know? A woman with a very soothing voice instantly lowered the price to $378.

4. Package deals

If you have already booked a flight, or are going on a longer, more complicated trip, package deals won't work. I went to Kayak's packages page and it led me to a promising deal on Priceline.com: a round-trip, nonstop flight for two from New York to Paris, plus four nights at the Crowne Plaza Paris-Republique, for $2,505. The cheapest nonstop fare on my dates was $2,503.

In other words, four nights at the four-star Crowne Plaza would essentially cost 50 cents a night.

5. Go opaque

Some of the sharpest discount retail rates come from opaque deals on sites like Priceline and Hotwire. You decide on star-level and broad geographic area, and then either bid (as with Priceline) or choose a discount rate. Only when your credit card is charged do you find out where you will be staying. I do opaque as a last resort, usually when savings means more to me than anything else.

6. Make the call

Call the place you have chosen (by Skype, to save money). Tell them you are about to reserve their hotel with, let's say, Hotels.com, and ask if they will give you a discount for booking direct.

Hotels typically pay a 20 to 30 percent commission to booking sites, so rationally speaking, they should be eager to split the difference with you.

7. Last-minute

This final step only applies if you have got a cancelable reservation, but with lower-cost hotels that is often the case.

Theoretically, you could check back every day to look for better deals, or have a site like Yapta.com send you alerts when prices drop. If there is a better deal, pull a switcheroo.

And - you're off to Paris. Sure, it was a lot of work, but it gets easier with practice.