courtesy of www.roadtripus.net

If you are looking for Omaha cheap hotels, you have a lot of excellent options to choose from. Here are the various ways you can do so in no particular order:

1. Priceline

Although it has a standard listing of hotels, it is known for its “Name Your Own Price” Service which allows you to bid on hotels. What Priceline essentially does is match hotels, which have unsold rooms, with visitors who want hotel bargains and don’t mind not knowing which hotel they’ll be staying in. When Priceline says that you’ll end up saving around 50% off the standard price you see on the typical hotel booking sites, they aren’t kidding! If you want to learn how to find cheap hotels in Omaha using this service, I have a 2 part series which tells you how to do so specifically for the Omaha area. Part 1 and Part 2

2. Hotwire

Hotwire is the same as Priceline except, rather than letting you bid on hotels, Hotwire has pre-determined prices. Here are some tips for using Hotwire to find cheap hotels in Omaha NE.

3. Metasearch

Metasearch sites pool in data from pretty much all of the hotel booking sites and then allow you to sort your results by things such as popularity and price.

Here are some you can use:

Kayak

Hotelscombined

Uptake

Tripadvisor

Sites like these do a very good job of gathering information (including prices and reviews) from all the bookings sites.

However, if you want to search by lowest price, metasearch sites don’t give you the the list of hotels with the lowest prices because taxes, which all hotel booking sites charge, are not included in all of their calculations.

Also, if you want to have the option to cancel, I haven’t yet found a metasearch site which allows you to sort your results by lowest price and by cancellation policy. Usually the lowest prices are also non-refundable.

Furthermore, because you have to open up a separate window to actually book a hotel, it might be easier to open up a new page for each of the major hotel booking sites (Hotels.com, Cheaptickets.com, Travelocity.com).

4. Browse the major booking sites

Assuming you sort your search results by “lowest price”, Hotels.com and Cheaptickets.com are both good choices to start your search for a cheap Omaha hotel. In the case studies I’ve done thus far, I found that Hotels.com and Cheaptickets.com usually have the lowest prices, at least for the criteria I used. I am 99% sure that you will get the same prices on Expedia.com as you do on Hotels.com and the same prices on Orbitz.com as you do on Cheaptickets.com.

If you want to book a cheap hotel for the Omaha area, here’s how I’d do it, based on my Omaha case study (I assume that you don’t mind not having a cancellation policy)…

1. Sort your search result by “lowest price” with either Hotels.com or Cheaptickets.com

2. Pick a hotel and write down its price

3. Compare the price you see to Travelocity.com , Hotels.com or Cheaptickets.com (whichever one you don’t use first), the hotel website, and a call to the hotel. You can also search for the particular hotel using one of the metasearch sites just to be safe.

If you want a cancellation policy, you’re going to have to do a little more homework. I suggest you pick a refundable hotel option from either Hotels.com, Cheaptickets.com, or Priceline.com (Priceline allows you to cancel for all of its hotels), compare the price you get to whichever two booking sites you didn’t get the hotel from, the price from the hotel website, and the price you get by calling the hotel.

Extra tip: Go to the Omaha Visitor’s Bureau. Click on “special offers”. You might find some deals there.

Also, if you want a hotel and a flight check out How much are you really saving on Travelocity?.

That’s it! With these methods you are sure to find Omaha cheap hotels for your stay.

Local Attractions (more to come!):

Our interview with Andrew Hershey of the Bemis Center.

omahacityweekly.com

Our interview with Craig Bond of the Shelterbelt Theatre.

From Shelterbelt With Love

Our interview with Bill Seidler, founder of the Bancroft Street Market.

bancroftstreetmarket.com

If you see an amazing deal online for cheap hotels in Omaha, chances are that the website is giving it to you not because the website magically gets deals, but because that particular hotel let them have that kind of deal on their website. I’ll give you an example…

Magnolia Hotel Omaha, the first hotel you see on hotels.com when you search for the Omaha area, at the time this article was written, has a deal for $104.30 per night for a hypothetical stay between May 19th and May 21st. The second lowest price online is on Orbitz for $139.69. I called the Magnolia hotel and was given some ridiculous number, $159. This is the price they give to suckers. I said, “Is that the best you can do?” I told her that there were deals online. She said, yes, we can match the price on our website. She gave me a lower price, this time a lower number, which she got from the hotel’s own site. I asked her if she could go any lower. She said that yes, “we can match any price online”, a far cry away from the original $159 and very different from the time she told me that she can only match the price on the hotel’s website. I told her that hotels.com was offering at $104 per night and she offered to match the price. Clearly, the hotel itself decides what the deals will be and the websites simply advertise these rates, determined by the hotels. I believe that hotels.com has better deals on their hotels than its competitors because it has better relationships with hotels.

Of course, some hotels in the Omaha area will offer special deals which you can only find by calling them. In the end, I think that there is no right way to buy a hotel. But just like when you are shopping for anything. Don’t settle for the first thing you see. Travel sites throw out so many commercials so that you have brand loyalty to them and don’t bother looking elsewhere for deals. Don’t settle, shop around, save money. That way, you can find not only cheap hotels in Omaha, but hotel reservations with value.