LiveCheap.com

Lets face it, getting a cheap hotel room isn’t that hard anymore. Used to be a time where you would call up your travel agent and they would look at their screens and quote you a price. You didn’t have any idea of whether this was the best price, but trusted that your travel agent was good enough to get you a decent rate.

Then the Internet arrived: Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and their blind bidding counterparts Priceline and Hotwire. Pretty quickly anyone who was Internet savvy could check a few sites and do comparison shopping and book a hotel. Travel agents everywhere started going out of business as more consumers hit their web browsers to do their travel.

I am a big fan of Priceline.com. I've booked nearly 50 rooms in 15 different cities and I’ve always felt I walked away with a great deal. I’ve stayed at Planet Hollywood in Vegas on a weekend for under $50 a night, the Omni in San Diego for $65, and a host of 4 star hotels all around the country on business travel, all for less than $90 a night. In fact, the worse the economy is, the better deals you can get on Priceline because, with the recession, there are a lot of empty hotel rooms out there. But mastering Priceline takes a little bit of an investment - taking the time to learn a few of the core tricks to get the best deal. Here’s some true and tried methods for getting a great price on a Priceline hotel.