Do you love to get the best deals when you travel? I do. I'm always looking for the best price on flights, hotels, and other various travel related expenses. I'd seen a few commercials about Hotwire.com recently and decided to check it out.

I was pleasantly surprised.

I have been doing a little bit of research over the last few years on which online travel booking agency is the best to use. The results of my unofficial and sporatic research have shown that they are almost all the same when it comes to price. For instance, if you were to use Orbitz.com, Expedia.com, Priceline.com, and Travelocity.com to compare the exact same flight, chances are pretty good that you will get the same price on each one, or at least within a few dollars. The reason is that they all get offered the same price from the same airlines, their markups are similar, and taxes remain fairly consistent across the board. I have even found that when one booking engine displays a much cheaper price, it's merely to grab your attention because they will make up the difference with the taxes and "other fees."

My tip for you when booking flights is to use Kayak.com and Bing.com's travel site. I like Kayak because it compares all of the different search engines, just in case there is a rare diamond in the rough to be found. Then, I go to Bing's travel site and look up the same flight to view the fare-cast predictor. This technology predicts the likelyhood of the price going down in the future or going up.

Ok, back to Hotwire.com. What makes Hotwire stand out from the rest? I pulled the following from their "About" page:

"We have special relationships with major travel providers to help them fill airline seats, hotel rooms, and rental cars that would otherwise go unsold, so our customers get them at prices lower than many other travel sites."

Granted, the majority of the time you search for a flight, Hotwire is going to be neck and neck with the other booking engines. But, on occasion, Hotwire may be ahead of the competition by offering a much lower price. Where Hotwire really excels is in their hotel deals. If you think about it, it makes sense. Different hotels around the world are slower in certain seasons, therefore they are willing offer big discounted prices just to fill the rooms and break even.

When you search for a hotel on Hotwire it will show you a list of options with the top option being the "best value." How do they determine the best value? They compare the number of stars the hotel has and the price being offered. But, they do not show the name of the hotel. At first I thought that this was a little shady, but then I clicked on a link to learn why and it said, "When brand-name hotels use us to fill rooms that would otherwise go unsold, their prices are deeply discounted. Hotels don't want to publicize rates this low, so we hide their name until after booking." This actually made me value their service more than before. It made me think that they really are giving out some good deals.

I'll be honest, I have not used Hotwire yet - I've only experimented. But I'd love to hear from those of you who have had good or bad experiences with them. In my mind, they are one of the only online booking agents who stand out from the competition when it comes to deals on travel. What are your thoughts?