So, what did I get?

Mom23nca asks what hotel I ended up with on my latest venture with Hotwire.  It was a result that made me burst out laughing.

See, I left out some of the story about how I usually deal with Hotwire.  Frequently, when I search for hotels for a particular weekend in New York, nothing comes up.  (Or, nothing in my price range.)  But, often, something will come up a lot closer to my travel date.  So what I usually do is book a back-up hotel -- something which (unlike purchases on hotwire) is fully refundable.  And then I keep checking hotwire periodically, and if a hotel comes up, I snag it and cancel the back-up reservation.

The past two times I've done this, I've had the same back-up hotel.  I've never actually stayed there -- because both times, I ended up cancelling it in favor of a better deal on hotwire.  But it ended up being my backup hotel because it tended to have a fairly reasonable rate (just around $200 -- which, sadly, is reasonable for New York) although the rooms always looked pretty small so I generally liked trading up to something on hotwire if the price was right. 

So, I usually book the backup hotel for around $200 a night, then I end up booking a 3 1/2 or 4-star hotel on Hotwire for a better price and I cancel the backup.  This time, the weekend was really booked.  Most hotels I checked were around $300 a night; a cheap hotel that I'd heard good things about was totally sold out; and my standard backup was pushing $230.  Hotwire offered me a 3-star hotel for $122 -- if it had come with that extra 1/2 star, I would've pounced on it, but 3-stars might be a little questionable, so I was cautious.  But not having found anything better, I took a deep breath and went with it...

.... and got my usual backup hotel.