If you are looking for Omaha cheap hotels, or any discount hotel from any city, there’s a very good chance that you need a hotel and a flight. In one of my earlier articles I concluded that all of the hotel booking sites are virtually the same in terms of pricing if you look at their standard listings of hotels. By “their” I mean hotels.com, orbitz.com, travelocity.com, orbitz.com, and priceline.com. By “standard”, I mean their listings of hotels only, not packages. I also concluded that hotels.com has the better deals in its standard listings of hotels. This time I want to look at what type of package deals I can get from a site like Travelocity. More specifically, I want to see if their advertised vacation package deals are as good as they seem, using the Omaha area as an example. So, how do you know if you are really getting a “deal” when you purchase a package from Travelocity? Follow these steps (I’m assuming you a purchasing a flight+hotel package):

Once you type in your criteria, you’ll first see that Travelocity automatically gives you a “Lowest Package Price Option” for your flight. You need to find out what this lowest package price option really is. How? Simply pretend to book a flight separtley, using the same search criteria you used when you searched for your vacation package. When selecting your flight options, select the same flights and times you see on the “Lowest Package Price Option”.

Travelocity.com

Travelocity.com

Now , go back to your search results for your vacation packages. Most of your advertised Travelocity savings will range from $7-$30. However, there will be some where the savings are huge, in the neighborhood of $100, $200, $300. Let’s say you see a deal where the advertised savings are for $118 for a hotel. Travelocity says that if you book separtley, you will pay $529. Whereas if you book together, you pay $411. Since you already know what the flight costs as part of your vacation package for a hotel and a flight, you need to find out what happens if you book your hotel separtley off of Travelocity.com. Simply type in the same search criteria as you did when you searched for your hotel+flight package. Once you find the same hotel, you can now add the cost of the hotel to the cost of the flight you found out earlier. To compare apples to apples, when finding out the price of your hotel, make sure to select the same hotel room type that is automatically given to you in the vacation package. You will likely find that, indeed, Travelocity advertised correctly when they gave you your vacation package savings. However, sometimes you’ll find that the “booked separtley price” does not match up with your numbers. Whether or not it matches up, you can now see whether the price for the hotel and flight deal within the package combines to give you the deal you are looking for. It would be wise to check other hotel booking sites or to contact the hotels themselves to make sure that they are not offering anything that would render your Travelocity savings meaningless. I once found hotels.com to be offering huge savings at the same time Travelocity was offering their package savings for the same hotel. I found Travelocity’s rates on their flights to be competitive, but you might get a better deal elsewhere online.

You might have figured this out by now, but the package savings depend mightily on the room type.

In one of the vacation packages I got for my hypothetical tests, I was given a savings of over $300. As part of my vacation package I was automatically given a “Queen Deluxe Room”. I found out the price of the flight and hotel, if I had booked the two separtley. Sure enough, had I booked the hotel separtley, I would have have to pay $300 extra because this “Queen Deluxe Room” was $100 more expensive per night than the other two types of rooms if I booked the hotel separately. BAM! $300 in “savings”. A call to the hotel confirmed that there is little difference between the room types. In fact, the hotel itself charged the least for its Queen Deluxe Room! The $300 in savings were a direct result of Travelocity having a ridiculously high price for a hotel room type in its standard listings of hotels and then removing this inflated expense in the vacation package. To add further insult to injury, I called this hotel and got a rate of $60 per night. I’d be saving hundreds of dollars by skipping this package deal altogether by purchasing the flight from Travelocity and booking the hotel directly from the hotel itself! This was one of the cheap hotels in Omaha Nebraska, and I had no way of knowing just by looking at Travelocity.

Travelocity.com, $316 in savings?

Travelocity.com, $120 more for the "Deluxe Room One Queen Bed" in its standard hotel listings

You might see, when you are checking the price of the hotel on Travelocity, pretending to book it separately, that there are discounts for the same room type you see in the vacation package. The advertised $120 discount for the vacation package might very well be a $70 discount. Sure, it’s a discount, but not nearly as much as advertised.

The prices Travelocity gives on its packages can change rapidly. This is because the “lowest” flight option availiable can change within a minute.

You can get good deals off of Travelocity when you buy a vacation package. You just have to make sure that your savings are really savings.

Key Points:

• Travelocity gives you a a “book separtley” price. You need to find out what this price consists of. This will give you a base from which you can decide whether or not you are really getting a deal. You can still get good savings if other sites have lower rates, it just means that your savings aren’t as high as advertised.
• When checking the hotel price, match the room type you see in the vacation package. You might see that your room type has a grossly inflated price which gives you your “savings”. You might also notice that the same room type has a special discount in the standard hotel listings, which decreases your overall package discount.
• Check hotel booking sites like hotels.com or see what type of rates the hotel itself has for the room type you see as part of your vacation package.
• Don’t be lazy. Sure, this takes a little work. But with 10 minutes of a research you can end up saving hundreds of dollars. Whether you want a cheap hotel in Omaha or some other destination, cheap flights to Miami or to Los Angeles, you want to make sure that what you are getting is indeed, cheap.

Finding cheap hotels in Omaha NE is simple on Hotwire. To understand how Hotwire.com works, it is best to compare it to its competitor, Priceline.com. Priceline allows you to bid on hotels. The catch is that you don’t know which hotel you’ll be staying at. You only know your selected star level and your selected zone or area in the Omaha area. If Priceline finds a hotel, which meets your criteria and accepts your bid amount, it is yours and your credit card is charged. There are forums dedicated to getting the lowest bid amount possible over at betterbidding.com and biddingfortravel.com. Hotwire works very much the same way. However, instead of you offering the lowest bid for a particular star level and zone, it gives you predetermined options from which to select. The Priceline bidding strategy, described here, does not apply for Hotwire. For example, one of its options for the Omaha area, at the time this article was written, is $93 per room per night for a 4 star hotel in the Downtown Omaha area. Another option is $65 per room per night for a 3 star hotel in the Downtown Omaha area. Once you buy one these options, you cannot get your money back. You can look at betterbidding.com to see what type of hotels other users got for the Omaha area. Simply scroll down to where it says “Montana / Nebraska / New Hampshire / New Mexico” and then go to the “Hotwire – Montana / Nebraska / New Hampshire / New Mexico” subforum. Then look at the type of hotels users got from Hotwire in the Omaha area. This will give you an idea of what deals you can except once you buy from Hotwire. For example, one user on betterbidding posted that for the 3-star West Omaha, he got the Crowne Plaza hotel at $67.53 per room per night whose original price on the hotel’s website was $99. The user posted that Hotwire gave him a price of $53, with taxes, it ended being $67.53. As you can see, Hotwire now has a rate of $59 without taxes for the West Omaha area for a 3-star hotel.

You’ll also notice in this sub forum that there is a pinned list at the top of the page which lists hotels, by zone for the Omaha area.

So which is better for getting cheap hotels in Omaha NE, Priceline or Hotwire? I answer that question in Hotwire vs Priceline: A Comparison.

Priceline.com is known for its Name Your Own Price service, which lets you bid on hotels. It acts as a third party between you, the bargain shopping customer, and the hotel, which is willing to sell their rooms at deeply discounted rates when they have unsold rooms. The catch to using this service is that you do not know exactly what type of hotel you’ll be staying in. You’ll only know the relative location of your hotel and the amount of stars it has. Thus, if you want to know exactly which Omaha cheap hotels you’ll be getting, this service isn’t for you. Regardless, the discounts users get from this service more than compensate for not knowing what hotel you’ll be staying in. In this article I explain how to get a 3 star hotel for around $50.

There are actually whole forums devoted to the subject of bidding on Priceline. But here is 99% of what you need to know to “beat the system” when looking for bargains:

First, check out betterbidding.com and biddingfortravel.com to see what types of bids were accepted for the Omaha area on Priceline. This will give you a good idea of how to bid for specific star levels. For example, betterbidding tells you that your bid for a 3 star hotel in the Omaha area should be around $45, because that is the typical winning bid for other users. You can check what the standard price for 3 stars by going to hotels.com. A quick look at hotels.com shows me that the general online rate is $100 to $170. Taking this information together, it means that your lowest bid for a 3 star hotel should be around $45 and the highest should be $100. If you bid more than $100 you risk overpaying for a 3 star hotel in the Omaha area.

Go to Priceline.com for the Omaha area. You’ll see that there are 7 zones (Bellevue, Central Omaha, Council Bluffs, Omaha Airport, Omaha Downtown, Southwest Omaha, and West Omaha). For each zone, write down the highest star level within it. You can find this find simply clicking and unclicking on a zone. Here is the info for all the zones:

Bellevue- 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus
Central Omaha- 3-Star Upscale
Council Bluffs- 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus
Omaha Airport- 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus
Omaha Downtown- 3-Star Upscale
Southwest Omaha- 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus
West Omaha- 3-Star Upscale

Keep in mind that there are a total of 4 star levels (1-Star Economy, 2-Star Moderate, 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus, and 3-Star Upscale). Lets assume that you want to stay in Omaha Downtown because it has a good location. You want the best, 3-star upscale. You bid $47 because that is close to other people’s successful bids, published on the aforementioned forums. You fill in your personal and credit card information and get rejected. If you listened to Priceline you’d have to wait another 24 hours to bid again. Game over? No! Hit the back button on your web browser to get to the original page where you entered your original $47 bid. Priceline allows you to rebid, but only if you change something (the date of your stay which you probably can’t anyways, your minimum star rating, which you don’t want to change either, or the zone). Remember how we made a list of the top star rating offered in each zone? The zones with the lower star ratings are your “fake” zones, which will allow you to bid again. For example, you can now select, in addition to your Omaha Downtown zone, the Southwest Omaha zone because it has a maximum of a 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus star rating, for a total of 2 selected zones, one of which is your dummy. You have now changed the zone criteria (because you’ve added an additional zone)! . You can now bid again for your Omaha downtown zone! Because your required star level is 3-Star Upscale, which the dummy Southwest Omaha zone doesn’t meet, you can be sure that you won’t get stuck with a hotel there. Just make sure that you bid slightly higher, say $48. If the $48 bid is rejected, no problem! Click the Priceline logo at the top left of the rejection screen and enter another 2 zone combination. You can now bid a higher price, say $49, using another dummy zone. For example, you can now use a combination of Omaha Airport and Omaha Downtown zone. If that fails again you still can bid two times by using the remaining Bellevue and Council Bluffs dummy zones. Just remember that the closer you get to $100, which we found is the standard rate for 3 star Omaha hotels, the less your discount is going to be. Rebidding using 2 zones is only the beginning, here I explain how to rebid using more than 2 zones, which can you let you rebid 16 times!

Regardless, this is the basics of rebidding on Priceline. You can get some amazing deals on Omaha cheap hotels, fast, using this method.