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You may not be able to find the $3.99 all-you-can-eat buffet on the Las Vegas Strip anymore, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great deals to be had, especially when it comes to lodging.
In the past, when I wanted to look for a cheap room in Sin City, I would check my old standbys–The Tropicana, Excalibur and Circus, Circus–and then move on to one of the price engines to see if any higher end hotels showed up, which rarely ever happened. I recently booked a night at the Excalibur this way two weeks back, when my mom invited Beth and I on her trip to Las Vegas for Cowboy Christmas.
It wasn’t until a few days after our Vegas stay that I discovered DealAngel, a new era in hotel search engines that puts the power back into the consumers’ hands. Now that I’ve found the site, I realize how ineffective and archaic my method was. There’s a good chance that I could have gotten a better deal at a higher star hotel, but I had no way of really knowing, because I didn’t have the time to go to each properties site to check on its rates.
Within seconds of inserting a destination, a new page reveals a three month span of calendars (you can search up to 11 months in advance) with color coded dates–green, yellow and red– that correspond with the likelihood of finding a good deal on that day.
If you already have set dates, just select your arrival and check out date on the calendar and you’ll be taken to another screen that displays a horizontal row of hotels, which can be categorized by Price, Name, Stars, Guest Reviews, Amenities and, my favorite, DealRank, which gives each a hotel a rating from A to F depending on the quality of the deal.
Aesthetically, I love this page. In my opinion, it breathes fresh air into a stale medium. The layout and design make the page easy to navigate the deals as well as locate their location effortlessly on the Google map display integrated into the page. For example, in a matter of seconds I was able to find some fantastic deals for hotels in Las Vegas, some of which were even cheaper or the same cost as some lower rated off-strip motels and hotels, and pinpoint its exact location.
If you decided to book one of the properties, you will then be referred to the channel that provides the best price. You can also check out all the rates for the property under the “Detailed Rates” tab. In a recent email conversation with Bob Rogers, DealAngel co-founder, he spoke to me about how the hotel site curates its pricing data. “DealAngel analyzes huge amounts of pricing data every day for complete markets to determine the ‘fair market rate’ for each hotel for each arrival day,” he explained. “This allows us to detect and flag hotels that are selling lower than they should be and push down the list hotels that are selling above what they should.”
He went on to say: “We are the only hotel provider that is transparent about how we sort hotels. Many competitors will be influenced by how much they earn, or how much business the hotel has brought in the past. Our sort changes every day, and is different for every arrival day, because every day the hotels are in a different competitive situation.”
I love finding new travel resources, especially ones that just work. And happy I’m to report DealAngel does just that. One thing I’ve learned from our travels is that accommodation planning can be a tedious, time consuming process, in which I spend most of my time bouncing between hotel sites and an online map only to find lackluster deals without really knowing if it is the best deal available. So, my hat goes off to the crew at DealAngel for making an intuitive site that makes finding hotel deals online fun again.
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