Should I book through an agent to get a hotel deal?
This really depends on where you want to travel, when you want to travel, and how far in advance you can make your hotel reservations for your trip. You already checked the popular online hotel booking web sites. Have you checked the hotel’s web site directly?

Which website to use finding hotel deals? No one site will always have the best hotel deals. You have to check the travel Meta search engine like www.chaklo.com to search and compare which site is offering the best hotel deal and at the cheapest price. Most people do not know about hotel deals.

Everyone seems paranoid about getting the best airfares when in fact we find that the lodging costs are usually the biggest expense when we go on vacation. Maybe it’s because airline travel is much more a commodity: there's much less variation (and much less choice) among air carriers than among hotels, so it makes more sense to compare hotel rooms on price.

A lot of people seem to go out of their way to $25 on an air ticket but ignore the fact that they could also save $25/day on a hotel room. The same hotel room; e.g. normal rates are typically a 10% discount.

What service to expect from a hotel deal?
Someone paying rack rate would expect the top quality service. If you pay at a discounted rate, should you expect less? No, you will get the same service in a hotel because other than the hotel sales / reservation staff none of them is aware that at price have you booked your hotel room.

This mean bid for hotel rooms on travel bidding site like bid2travel.com makes lots of sense. It means you can bargain for hotel room directly with the hotel where you are booking hotel rooms.

In a way if you bid on hotel rooms is accepted by the hotel at bid2travel.com then you can be sure of getting the best possible price which can be even half of the other online hotel booking sites. The reason for this lowest possible hotel room price is that you are dealing with the hotel directly and cutting all the intermediaries commission.