It pays to do your homework

It's 3am, Wednesday, and I am finishing the booking of air and travel for the next 10-day assignment which begins after I finish photographing Kermit the Frog on Capitol Hill, travels to Rochester NY, then Los Angeles, then Las Vegas, then Oakland, then Los Angeles, before returning to DC. It's an exhaustive trip, and we spent much of the day today in pre-production, packing bags to confirm to size and weight restrictions, and so forth.

In Los Angeles, the client is staying in the West Hollywod area, and gave us several recommendations for where to stay. Typically, we make these calls ourselves, however, we were surely amenable to their suggestions. One of them was the Hyatt West Hollywood. I checked Orbitz (graphic above), and it was $215 a night, for this 4-star "upscale" hotel.

I decided to have a look at Priceline, to see where hotels would fall price-wise.

(Continued after the Jump)

Remarkably, by selecting 4-star, and West Hollywood as my options, I found myself and my team booked into...the Hyatt West Hollywood for $106 a night! A significant savings, to be sure! Laughably, Orbitz's site says "lowest price guarantee", which is clearly not the case here.

In the end, this was over a 50% savings from booking with Orbitz.

I post this as a suggestion that, as the title of the entry says, "it pays to do your homework."

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