Using Hotwire and Priceline for Airline Travel - Get the Better of Two Deals!

There are a number of travel search engines around, such as Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and others. Those can be helpful in finding great fares for flights, hotel prices and rental cars. But there is another way to go depending a bit on your flexibility in time of arrival at your destination and time of day when you return.

Hotwire.com is a site that lets you select an itinerary and dates and will return a number of options. The lowest cost ones are listed showing a price but not the airline nor the times of your flight. The benefit is that the prices they offer this way are usually markedly lower than if you picked a scheduled flight. The hotwire tickets are still on major airlines, so it's not as if you're flying in a baggage compartment or an airline no one's ever heard of. (If the degree of uncertainty isn't something with which you're comfortable, they also offer prices for more clearly labeled flights/times, similar to Orbitz etc.)

Booking with hotwire means you know you'll be flying on the date you requested, not knowing for sure the time of departure or exact arrival. With certain trips you might still be able to generalize... overseas trips usually depart times of day (i.e. most European flights from the east coast depart in the late afternoon or evening with arrivals early the next day)... but since it's just a generality your flexibility still has to be there.

But let's say you want to make that trip to Europe and you know you can fly on a Tueday of one week and return the following Tuesday. If it's not critical whether you fly at noon or at 6:00, if it's not critical if you arrive at 8:00 am or noon, then maybe the hotwire savings might make the difference worth taking. You still are sure the dates are met, so you can still fit it into your overall vacation schedule. We have saved a couple of hundred bucks at times with this kind of travel option, so it might be worth considering.

But here's step 2 of the process: if you've decided to check hotwire and get a price on a flight, don't book it instantlty. That hotwire quote is generally good for a brief amount of time (I cannot recall if it's an hour or if it's less, but there is enough time to do the following):

Go to priceline.com. Again, they offer lots of ways to book tickets but the way they started was to let you offer how much you'd be willing to spend and they'd see if any airline would accept your bid (they also would not tell you the airline or exact times). So why use them now? Because hotwire's price gives you a price range for bidding. You can quickly put in the same itinerary and dates into priceline, and decide how much below the hotwire offer to bid. You would bid below, because if priceline says 'no' then you simply go back to hotwire and book it. If priceline accepts your lower offer, all the better and you've saved even that much more!

The thing to be aware of with this step is the length of time the hotwire price is valid, so you have that price floor as a safety net. You don't want to have it expire while you're dealing with priceline (I think you usually get a priceline answer back in several minutes). You'll have enough time without rushing, but it needs to be done promptly. I was once able to save an additional $30 off a $189 roundtrip to Houston shown by hotwire when priceline accepted my bid.

As far as how much below hotwire to bid, that's a matter of judgment; you want the savings to be enough that it would be worth it to get accepted. I would judge how 'hot' the ticket should be (are you traveling peak times/days, popular destinations or less so) and try to pick a number that's reasonably below hotwire's based on those considerations -- also, with a very expensive ticket, a difference of 10% might be worthwhile and on a smaller one, it might need to be 15-20% to make the digging worthwhile.

Also be aware that hotwire and priceline, like all the other engines whether expedia, orbitz etc., work with the major airlines and not with names such as Southwest, Frontier, Spirit etc. So no matter what you find on hotwire, there may still be better fares looking elsewhere on the web. But the hotwire/priceline combination might just fit the bill for some of your future travel planning.