Cheap hotels are very important, especially if you plan on staying in a particular city for any length of time.  Fortunately, you can find the cheapest rooms in town using several methods.

              Unfortunately, the absolute cheapest prices are usually those seedy motels that look like they would collapse if some blew on them.  It is always important to find the lowest prices, but in this case we will focus mainly on hotels or chain motels, although there may be some exceptions.  You always want to be safe.

               You may have heard that Priceline will allow you to name your own price on hotels, and if it is accepted, you will automatically be charged and booked a room in a hotel that won’t be revealed to you unless you purchase the room first.  Also, you won’t know what the lowest price is and what location it will be in until you bid up to the required amount. 

Name your own price at Priceline.com.  There are several sites dedicated to taking advantage of the system and getting extremely low prices.

             There is a way around this system.  Basically, you can use a prepaid credit card with a low balance, a canceled card, or virtual account number that has such a low limit a purchase wouldn’t go through.  When you put your card number in before the final approval, you will know if your offer is accepted if Priceline attempts to charge the card but it fails.  This way you can scope out the lowest prices and locations to find what you want.  The following thread at Slickdeals explains it better (“How to get the LOWEST price at Priceline.com"): http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=253736.  One user was able to stay at the Sheraton Suites for $30 a night, a three star hotel.  I have used this to find $50 per night rooms at nicer hotels.  Also, there are sites where users post what their lowest accepted bids were and where they were made, such as BetterBidding (http://www.betterbidding.com/).  This similar method can also be used for Hotwire, I believe.