Our criteria for testing included using all apps to search for stays in the same area for the same dates with a lodging requirement of 1 bedroom and 1 bed for 2 guests. In this case, we focused our search on stays in the Lake Tahoe area but also searched in Palm Springs as a cross-reference. 

We filtered results for our budget of $200 a night (before taxes and extra fees) and looked specifically for stays that were in proximity to the lake or at least no more than 1 mile. For Palm Springs, we searched for stays close to the downtown center. We also gave ourselves only 15 minutes of research time per app to see which delivered the best options in a limited amount of time and based the quality of the stay on the star hotel rating as well as the user ratings and reviews across different booking sites. 

According to a few different sources, the lowest prices for hotels generally appear on Fridays, which is the day of the week that we researched these prices. We tested both for dates on the next weekend (one week out) as well as dates for the weekend exactly 4 weeks out. We also tested prices for night of booking on that Friday, since a few of the apps we tested, Hotel Tonight and Hotwire, are touted as the best last-minute deals.

The Hotwire app gave us by far the best deals on highly rated hotels, especially with their extra, mobile-only savings. With our testing criteria, our search on Hotwire matched us with our favorite hotel of all the options and was our fastest booking process at only 8 minutes. 

Even though you do not get to know your hotel's exact name until after you have completed the non-refundable booking, most times, it's not too hard to figure out. With the provided information such as location area, reviews, and ratings, we were often able to narrow down the hotel name. In fact, we were given a 50/50 chance with two hotel names in some listings and guaranteed the stay would be at one of them. Plus, you still get plenty of necessary info, including what the specific hotel is doing to be COVID-19 safe. 

It’s important to remember that this app is best for relatively last-minute booking such as day of or about a week or two out, but they do have moderate savings for advance booking such as three or more weeks. These deals are exclusive to Hotwire based on their partnerships with certain hotels, and since the hotel names are not given, these deals do not show up on aggregator websites like Tripadvisor. 

For booking a week out on Hotwire, we were able to get a room in a highly rated 4-star hotel for only $128 per night, including taxes and fees, while the same booking on the hotel's website ran us a total of $217. That's 41% less than the final price of booking on the hotel’s website. 

The app also consistently saves around $10 off the final price when booking on the app over the Hotwire.com website, and the app has other useful features like notifications on new deals for a trip that you are watching (and the deals do go very fast.)

As mentioned, Hotwire's biggest snag is the fact that you cannot see the hotel name that you are booking and that you usually have to pay upfront (no delayed payment upon arrival). These bookings are non-refundable in most cases. 

In order to narrow down the hotel that it was likely to be, I looked at the map they provided, which gives a 2-mile radius of the area the hotel will be located and compared that with average user ratings and reviews after a Google search of hotels in that area. 

Given that there are only so many hotels in a 2-mile radius that fit the given specifications, it was not too hard to figure out. Or I often found that even if I could not determine the exact hotel, I would be happy with either choice when given 2 options. I didn’t come across any under 3-star hotels, and most were 4-star and above from guaranteed reputable hotel chains, so it’s not a bad gamble and certainly worth the good deals.

We saved the most with Priceline for booking further in advance and noticed that the savings listed directly on the app were actually significantly better than the prices given when clicking from an aggregator app. 

For the hotel we chose, the final price was $180 per night with taxes included, while the Tripadvisor listing for the same stay was $224 with tax, and even when clicking through to Priceline from Tripadvisor to complete the booking, the price did not lower. 

We also noticed that we saved almost $20 after the extra fees by booking on the app rather than the Priceline website, which was the most significant mobile discount of all of the ones we tried. 

Again, it is worth noting that these savings were for an advance booking, and the apps Hotwire and Hotel Tonight proved to get better deals for hotels booked the night of or one week out. But Priceline definitely delivered the lowest prices for hotels booked a month out and had lower prices for the same exact hotels than Tripadvisor, Kayak, and Booking.com.

Among all of the apps, Airbnb had the lowest bottom line prices for highly-rated stays in vacation rentals and private homes, apartments, or rooms. 

While many aggregator apps like Trivago or booking apps like Hotels.com technically include private homestays like these, we found those options are minimal. For example, even though Trivago claims to pull from Airbnb in its listings, we didn’t find any on the first few pages even though there were plenty of results on the Airbnb app itself. 

Airbnb got us our best private stay option near the lake at less than $200 per night final cost when booking a month out, though there were significantly fewer search results available that matched our criteria than the other hotel-based apps, especially when booking only a week out. This could be because homestays seem to be a slightly more popular option in the current social distancing situation. 

Even so, Airbnb brought better prices than the other two homestay apps we tested, Vrbo and Home To Go. Vrbo, in particular, had about the same amount of results but much higher extra fees, and it wasn't easy to find anything in our budget of less than $200 a night. Most were closer to $300 or more, especially in the areas we wanted to stay.

Also worth mentioning, especially because it is a bit of an underdog among these other hotel apps with 50-100 million downloads, is the app Hotellook. This is a travel price aggregator, so it collects prices from other booking sites, and you click on those sites to book, but it seems to bring the best deals of all the aggregators. 

It had many of the same prices seen on Tripadvisor, but there were some exclusive deals too, which surprised me. The best deals seemed to be between Hotellook and the app SnapTravel, some of which were over $20 cheaper than the same SnapTravel price listed on Tripadvisor. 

They also had a surprisingly great selection of discounted hotels, with 3-4 star hotels that were on average rated at about 8/10 by users (via Booking.com.) Even though a few of these strayed a bit out of our $200 a night budget, we found a really nice 4-star hotel for only $205 a night that was 10% cheaper than the lowest price on Tripadvisor for the same hotel and 21% cheaper than booking straight through the hotel website.

The booking app Hotels.com may be a bit of an obvious choice, and the prices are really not different from the Hotels.com prices that are listed through the aggregator apps (no discount going directly to the app like with Priceline.) Where this app shines is its hotel booking rewards program. 

Much like a coffee shop punchcard, you get a free night of stay each time you collect 10 reward stamps. You get a reward stamp for each night booked and one extra reward stamp for booking through the app. Booking stays through the app seems to rack up stamps pretty fast, and the reward night is equal to the average value of the stamps collected. Saving around $200 sounds pretty good to us!

This one has been one of our favorites for booking last minute deals in the past, but we were surprised to find that Hotwire had much lower day of prices. Many of the Hotwire prices for same-day booking were well under $100 a night, while HotelTonight ranged more in the $110-$175 range. Of course, the difference is that you get to know what hotel you are booking with HotelTonight, but Hotwire really out-delivers as far as best deal.

Going directly to Expedia actually has some lower prices than those listed for Expedia on TripAdvisor, so it may be worth going to the app over the aggregator to double-check. But the deals were not better than the apps we picked in the end.

Since this one is probably the most popular aggregator app of the ones we looked at, we used it as a benchmark and comparison to many of the apps. However, since deals were sometimes better going to the actual app, like Priceline, and it did not include any Hotwire or Hotel Tonight deals, we don’t think it got us to the absolute best deals out there. However, this one does get extra credit points for the great user interface and the ease of scrolling through photos on the search page.

We were surprised by how much more expensive stays were with Vrbo over Airbnb! There are definitely more fancy options on this app than Airbnb, but if you’re looking for a good value for less, Airbnb is more worth the search time.

This is a solid booking site, but there didn’t seem to be any special deals. It seems better to find Booking.com prices through aggregators like Hotellook and TripAdvisor so you can compare with other sites.