7 steps to a cheaper hotel room

Websites and wrangling can mean steep price cuts, Seth Kugel from the New York Times News Service reports.

There are so many ways to wrangle deals on hotel rooms these days that no matter how great a bargain you find, it is not uncommon to worry you missed a better one.

The most obvious method to suss out savings is to explore the pricing and inventory differences among standard booking sites like Hotels.com and Orbitz.com. But dig a little deeper and there are countless ways to find "unpublished" rates, typically on excess rooms hoteliers think they won't be able to sell at full or even publicly discounted prices.