You've seen the ads. Get a cheap San Diego hotel by bidding online, they say. Skeptical? You're not alone. So was I, until I reserved a four-star San Francisco hotel for just $70. It worked several times, and now I won't leave home without it.
Here's how cheap a San Diego hotel can get: In early August, 2004, you could stay at 4-star Hyatt Regency La Jolla ($289 and up) for $73 a night and 3-star Hilton del Mar (starts at $179) for $70. If you want to find a cheap,nice San Diego hotel, we've simplified the process.
Seven Steps to Find a Cheap San Diego Hotel
You'll use Priceline to find your cheap San Diego hotel, using biddingfortravel.com for research. After doing steps 1-2 below, you can do steps 3-5 yourself or get help. Just register at biddingfortravel, do the research to fill out an Bidding Assistance Form and post your request.
Someone will respond with a strategy. Our do-it-youself process is quicker, but you may get a slightly lower rate with help. Pick Areas
Go to Priceline, click Hotels and select San Diego. Enter any date (you just want to see the map on the next page). Pick the area(s) you want to stay in. Write them down.
Most convenient: Downtown, Mission Valley
Most upscale: San Diego Coastal (includes La Jolla), Coronado
Cheap: Miramar , Carlsbad
NEW YORK - While planning her holiday to New York, Lisa Werness was so horrified by the prices in Manhattan that she chose cheaper lodging in Brooklyn - where she got a room rate of just $US400 ($A457) a night. "Don't remind me. I'm trying to forget about it," she said. In a city where residents often pay more than half their salaries for a place to sleep, visitors have long faced a shortage of hotel rooms and rising prices. Now, with 8,500 hotel rooms under construction in the city - a growth of more than 10 per cent - that crunch could ease slightly in the coming months. By comparison, it took from 1998 to 2007 to make a leap of the same size.
Even the current influx of new rooms is unlikely to glut the market and knock down prices, Hennessey said, although he noted that an economic downturn could lead companies to cut back on business travel, which could lead to cheaper rates. As of October, New York had 59 hotels under construction - more than any of the 26 other US cities with the largest number of hotel rooms, according to Smith Travel Research.
While properties already under construction are unlikely to be called off, the mortgage crunch has some in the industry wondering if future projects might be slowed by the rising price of financing. Either way, it seems unlikely that a city with such high real estate prices will soon be offering truly cheap hotel rooms.
I always hope that my cheap hotel does not end up like the 2005 movie "Hostel."
Here's a description from imdb.com: "Three backpackers are in Amsterdam where they get locked out of their youth hostel. They are invited into a man's house where he tells them of a hostel somewhere in eastern Europe where the women are all incredibly hot and have a taste for American men. When they get there, everything is too good to be true - the hostel is "to die for.""
Here's a review from imdb.com:
As a rule, I find horror films a little tiresome, but Hostel starts with a great premise and slowly builds up to some outrageous horror. The film tips its hat to some of the classics, and there's even a delightful cameo of Pulp Fiction playing in the background. It's not good that the premise of the movie is revealed in the IMDb listing as you don't learn the truth until near the end of the movie and it all starts to make a lot more sense. One thing about horror films which has always bugged me is that the bad guys never seem real to me, as if they are some kind of limitless satanic evil or whatever. In Hostel, by contrast, we really believe that the scenario is very plausible and for that, all the more frightening. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this kind of thing goes on in certain parts of the world. As far as maximum creep value, I saw it in a packed house at a screening in Beverly Hills last night, and many in the audience couldn't take it and ran out -- one guy was retching in the bathroom and was too scared to leave! The organizer had to talk him down and call one of his friends to take him home. The director was there for a Q&A which will be on the Creative Screen writing Magazine podcast, and he said that at one test screening they had to call a ambulances for two different people. It appears that the explicit sex, torture and violence will not be toned down for the theatrical release and it will still have an R rating instead of NC-17 which most of us thought it deserved. The trick, is that there is no sex during the violent scenes, and no violence in the sex scenes, which makes the MPAA more comfortable. By the way, this was shot near Prague, and is amazingly beautiful to look at -- I was there a month ago and the place is like something out of a fairy tale (unlike most historic European areas, there isn't a McDonalds every hundred feet). The ending is very, very satisfying yet believable and unforced. The audience was screaming, gasping, cheering, and hiding their faces at all the right moments. Eli's interview was a hoot, also, so check out the podcast once they post it on itunes. It's worth it for no other reason than to hear his anti-Union rant!
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