Jay Miller, “Downtown Colorado Springs” October, 30 2007 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

If you are looking for Colorado Springs cheap hotels, or any cheap hotel for that matter, you might be suffering from information overload. You want a good price, but where do you start? I break down the options…

1. Priceline

When hotels have unsold rooms and are looking to sell them off at discounted rates they use Priceline and/or Hotwire to fill them. Both sites connect these hotels to bargain shopping customers. For the year of 2008 Priceline ranked second , only behind Hotwire, for customer satisfaction among all travel sites. If you only look at pricing, Priceline is the site to find hotels for the Colorado Springs area. Using Priceline to Find Colorado Springs Hotel Deals tells you how to get immediate rebids with Priceline for the Colorado Springs area.

2. Hotwire

J.D. Power & Associates has ranked Hotwire number 1 in customer satisfaction for 3 straight years (2006-2008). Hotwire works the same way as Priceline. The main difference between the two is that Hotwire’s prices are predetermined/fixed. If you want to use either Hotwire or Priceline for finding a cheap hotel in Colorado Springs, but can’t decide on which one, check out Hotwire vs. Priceline: A Comparison.

3. Metasearch sites

Metasearch sites gather information from hundreds of hotel booking sites.

Sites which allow you to sort your hotel search results by lowest price include:

Kayak.com

Sidestep.com

Hotelscombined.com

In my non-scientific test for the Colorado Springs area, when I sorted by lowest price for each of the above three, Kayak.com and Sidestep.com gave me the same exact results. This is not surpising considering that Kayak now owns Sidestep. Hotelscombined.com gave me slightly different results. Regardless, all three gave me the same range of prices, with the lowest price for each starting at $47 for the “Travelodge Colorado Springs South”. This means that you’d be safe with either of these 3 metasearch sites.

Uptake.com is another metasearch site. Although you can’t sort your hotel results by lowest price, it does a good job of reporting the reviews from the various hotel booking sites.

Tripadvisor.com is known as the review site. Although it doesn’t gather review information from all the different sites like Uptake, it already has a lot of reviews on its own site to help you make an informed decision on where to stay. I found that when I sorted by “lowest price” for the Colorado Springs area, the hotels I saw were very similar to what I saw on Kayak, Sidestep, and Hotelscombined.

So, which of these sites (Kayak, Sidestep, Hotelscombined, Uptake, or Tripadvisor) do you use when you want to find cheap hotels in Colorado Springs? It’s all up to you. There is no “perfect” site out there to find a cheap hotel. If you like seeing reviews, check out Uptake or Tripadvisor. If you want some of the lowest prices, check out Kayak, Sidestep, or Hotelscombined. There are other sites out there that you can use but I guarantee you that if you use only 1 of these sites, you’ll make a good decision.

4. Browse the major booking sites/websites of the hotels themselves

Why browse booking sites such as Hotels.com, Cheaptickets.com, or Travelocity.com as well as the hotels’ websites when you can just sort by lowest price on the metasearch sites? Well, price isn’t everything. I have yet to find a metasearch site which allows you to sort your search results by lowest price and by cancellation policy. You’ll find that many if not most of the lowest rates are non-refundable.

Even if you find the lowest price from one of the metasearch sites such as Kayak, prices change all the time, minute by minute. In Price Match Guarantees of the Major Booking Sites I examine the price match polices of all the major booking sites.

Although metasearch sites scan “everything”, it is unlikely that you’d be getting ripped off if you buy from one of the major booking sites after comparing prices amongst the booking sites and the hotel website. Prices from different hotel booking sites is not like the stock market. There is a price floor which all prices gravitate towards to. Which of the major booking sites are closest to this price floor? So far I have found that Hotels.com and Orbitz.com/Cheaptickets.com have very competitive prices, although other sites will have better prices for different areas.

5. Call the hotel

Once you get a price by using either one of the metasearch sites or comparing booking sites and hotel website prices, try calling the hotel to see if they can’t get you a better deal. Although I didn’t have much luck over the phone using this method in my Colorado Springs Hotels case study (A lot of the hotels told me that they are too booked for my hypothetical date due to graduation), I had a lot more luck in my Omaha Hotels case study when I booked my hypothetical stay months in advance.

Keep in mind that whichever way you use to book your hotel for the Colorado Springs area, you might not be getting the best price. You’ll be getting a good price. And, when looking for Colorado Springs cheap hotels, that’s all we’re looking for.