Small Luxury Hotels (slh.com)
This site delivered a few values, such as $1,960 for seven nights at San Francisco's Dolphin Bay Hotel—more than $400 less than the next lowest rate we could find. Many of SLH's deals are on packages that don't specify the room type, making comparison shopping particularly difficult.

Branded Hotel Sites
In recent years, hotel companies have become more aggressive about wooing consumers to their sites, chiefly because it's the cheapest way for them to sell rooms. Unfortunately, from what we can see, they're not passing those savings on to consumers. Bjorn Hanson, a leading hotel industry analyst with PricewaterhouseCoopers, reports that the average room rate in an online booking is considerably less than the average rate in a booking made any other way, but our research showed that this was not the case with hotel Web sites. On the contrary, we found some very good values by contacting properties directly. For instance, when we called Timara Lodge, in Marlborough, New Zealand, we were quoted $968 for two nights; the hotel's Web site would have charged us a whopping $2,221!

Aggregators
One of the best and easiest ways to scour the Internet for the lowest room rate is to use an aggregator search engine such as Kayak, Mobissimo, or SideStep. They troll hundreds of travel sites (but not Expedia or Travelocity), making comparison shopping a breeze. For our test, we used Kayak because it is fast and user-friendly and provides the most hotels per search. In a head-to-head comparison with Andrew Harper, Luxury Link, and the hotels' own Web sites and reservations lines, Kayak met or beat the lowest price 25 percent of the time.

In some cases, Kayak led us to third-party foreign sites, some of which may not be familiar to American travelers. Even so, the savings can be impressive—as in three nights at Rome's Majestic for $1,716, $119 less than the lowest rate offered by the hotel itself.

Travel Booking Sites
We also put the three leading online travel sites—Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity—through their paces, searching for five-star hotels at a variety of destinations. They all produced some good values compared to other sites, but none came out consistently ahead. Still, these sites are definitely worth a try when you're shopping for the best price. In one noteworthy instance, Expedia quoted us a rate of $160 per night for Dublin's Brooks Hotel, compared with $250 on the property's Web site.

Charge Cards and Travel Agents
American Express Platinum Card
Countless charge cards promise countless benefits, but AmEx Platinum stands out because it is aligned with one of the world's largest travel agencies and offers numerous amenities with every stay. Booking a room through Platinum's travel service entitles cardholders to continental breakfast for two, late checkout, a "customized amenity" (such as a spa treatment), and an automatic room upgrade if one is available. And according to cardholder Deborah DeMaria, of New York City, it usually is. "It's definitely worth the $395 fee," she says. "The card can pay for itself in just one night."