If you're heading for New Orleans or the big tourist cities in Nevada or Florida, you might be interested in a piece of free software called Travelaxe, which you can download from www.travelaxe.com. You tell Travelaxe where and when you want to go to one of these places and it searches the websites from a number of travel services. Then it displays all the prices it finds for hotel rooms in that city on that date so you can pick one to your liking. I just ran a test on hotel prices in Las Vegas and was amazed at the wide variation in prices. For example, on the test dates I picked arbitrarily (two off-peak nights in June), a service called TripReservations wants $495 for the Luxor, whereas Las Vegas Travel Bureau quotes $150. Conversely, for the same two dates at the Monte Carlo, L.V.T.B. wants $172 while TripReservations wants $154.
Even if you're not heading for Vegas, this presents a good object lesson in how prices can vary wildly from site to site. Each of the 16 travel sites surveyed in this quickie test was the cheapest for some hotel and the most expensive for some other hotel. (To further point up how unpredictable the rates are, remember that the Luxor and the Monte Carlo are sister hotels.)
The Internet is loaded with bargains if you know where to look. The other day, I was about to order a little over $200 worth of office supplies from the Staples website when it suddenly occurred to me to look for discount coupons. I did a quick Google search for "staples discount" and, in ten seconds, found a coupon code for $40 off my order. Forty bucks for ten seconds of work is pretty good, even if you're Bill Gates.