With Labor Day weekend fast approaching, perhaps you’re thinking about a quick trip to Vegas. Airfares aren’t too expensive, but the cost of a hotel room may give you second thoughts, especially since the best properties tend to get up booked up during holiday weekends.
Fortunately, Bing Travel has created an intelligent tool to help you figure out whether the hotel rate you’re being offered is a deal or not. Unlike the Price Predictor, the Hotel Rate Indicator doesn’t project whether the cost of a room will go up or down on the dates you want to stay; instead, it compares the current rates to past rates for that hotel, helping you buy with confidence.
Here’s how it works. From Bing Travel, search hotels in Las Vegas for your dates. On the search results page, you can filter by the number of stars, amenities, brand or geographical location. Then, click “open map” to see a visual layout of the available hotels for your selections:
In this example (the search was conducted on July 27), the yellow coloring shows that most of the hotels on the Strip have an “average rate” for Labor Day weekend. Mouse over each property and you’ll see the specific prices, such as $299 for the Bellagio (#8).
The hotel with the green coloring is the Hard Rock Hotel (#2), which the Rate Indicator says is a “deal,” with an average price of $239/night. That could be a great choice for your stay in Vegas. And the hotel shaded in red? That’s the Mirage (#14), which is marked as “not a deal,” with an average rate of $319.
The Hotel Rate Indicator is also great for travelers whose dates are flexible. Let’s suppose you’d really like to stay at the Mirage, so you can watch its exploding volcano up close. Click on the hotel listing to see the average rates for weekends before and after the dates you originally picked:
Here, the Rate Indicator shows you that you could actually stay at this property for about half the cost, just by going the weekend before. Mouse over the short green bar and you’ll see that the average rate is only $169. Now that’s a deal! Just be sure not to squander all your savings at the blackjack table.
— Mike Fridgen, Director, Bing Travel