Priceline Hotel Bidding

Mammoth discounts on posh hotel prices are available via bidding site Priceline. Better still there’s a sneaky trick to beat the system and guarantee you win hotel rooms for the cheapest possible price. One MoneySaver got six days in the New York Sheraton Time Square for £330 rather than the expected £1,200.

However, with Priceline, be aware you don’t know which hotel you’re booking until you pay, only the location and star level, and you have to agree to get the hotel room before you sign up. Yet there are sneaky ways to work it out. Priceline’s especially strong for North American hotels, but is pretty good elsewhere too.

What’s so special about Priceline?

As well as selling named hotel rooms, Priceline has a ‘name your price’ function. Here, you pick an area, for example Barcelona West, and choose a star rating. You then enter the price you're willing to pay and it'll search hotels in that area for that price.

The most important thing to understand about priceline is…

Once you enter details, and ask it to find a price, you’re committed. If it finds one, your card's automatically charged.

It works because hotels are able to offer discounts on unsold rooms, and as you can't get a refund they're guaranteed a sale.

How much can you save?

Using the clever bidding techniques described later, MoneySavers commonly report bagging rooms at 70% off the usual rates. Here’s a couple of recent examples:

“We bagged six nights at the Sheraton Manhattan Times Square for £336; that’s £55 a night. To book direct with the hotel would cost £1,230 or £205 per night, so my whole trip, including flights, was cheaper than I would have paid for the hotel alone.”

“In the last year I've saved hundreds of pounds in locations as diverse as Manchester and Salt Lake City. New York is particularly good. My best bargain ever was Hilton Times Square for $105 (cheapest rate $300).”

For further inspiration add your story/read others in the Priceline Success Thread.

Who’s it suitable for?

Priceline’s fabulous if you’re flexible, and want to stay in a large city or resort, as there’s much more choice. While there are decent discounts to be had in Europe, Priceline comes into its own even more when booking in large North American cities. Yet be warned, you can’t specify things like ‘a swimming pool’ and there’s a no cancellation policy.

Beat the system to get the best price

This isn’t like eBay: with Priceline you put in a bid at a certain price and immediately find out whether it’s been accepted. Therefore, in a perfect consumer world, you’d put in a £20 bid for a five star hotel, see if it's rejected, then gradually increase the price until it’s accepted, thus getting you the hotel at Priceline’s lowest possible price.

Priceline stops this by only allowing one bid a day...
However, there’s a way round it.

By imposing this limit, Priceline hopes you’ll put in a higher bid to ensure you get the room, and thus it’ll make more. Those who didn’t know the workaround paid a decent £60 for the Marriot Heathrow, but those who did paid £30. Thanks to all those MoneySavers, especially Blindman (see his Priceline bidding guide), for lots of tips and info.

Step 1. Benchmark the price

First use techniques in the Cheap Hotels guide to find the cheapest standard price for a hotel in the class you’re after; after all, there’s no point in paying more than that. Burn that figure into your mind and don’t bid above it.

Step 2. Check clues for what you’re likely to get

There’s no way to predict exactly which hotel you’ll win, but this step can help you avoid booking into shabby establishments. Go to Tripadvisor*, and in the search box, plug in the name of the city/place and the word Priceline i.e. “San Francisco Priceline”. The search will usually come up with a list of reviews from people who've booked through Priceline.

Alternatively, the US-based websites Biddingfortravel and Betterbidding are dedicated to cataloguing exactly which hotels people win and how much for. They focus on hotels in the States, Canada and the Caribbean, though Biddingfortravel lists a few in Europe. Search for your destination to see which hotels people are bagging. Again, these are not comprehensive, but are a fab guide.

How to avoid hellholes

If your research uncovers a real dump, search the hotel’s own website to see if it has rooms available for your dates. If it does, check to see which area it’s in. When you bid for a hotel, Priceline carves up the city into several areas and asks you to pick which ones you want. Don’t tick that hotel’s zone.

Remember, this list won’t be exhaustive, but it’ll give you a good idea of the hotels people are winning in that locale.

Step 3. Place your bid

How much should you bid? It’s not an exact science, but Tripadvisor, Betterbidding and Biddingfortravel will give you a rough idea of how much people have won hotels for previously.

The more extra daily bids you have available (see the next step to work that out) the lower price you can set your first bid, then gradually edge it up. If you’ve no extra bids, try somewhere between the lowest win you’ve seen reported and the cheapest price you’ve found for a similar standard hotel.

Step 4. Take advantage of extra bids

Now, this is the geeky science bit, so listen up. In order to win rooms for the very lowest price, you need to exploit a loophole allowing you to bid again and again in one day, inching up your price until you hit the threshold. In order to do this, you need to know some of crucial facts about Priceline:

• You pick which area you want to stay in
  
  Priceline carves cities into several ‘zones’, e.g. for London: Notting Hill and Regents Park, and asks you which ones you’re prepared to stay in.

• You can be upgraded but not downgraded
  
  When bidding, you specify a star level. While you can be upgraded, i.e. three star to four star, you can’t be downgraded. Boutique hotels can’t be either up or downgraded.

  So if there aren’t any hotels of your chosen star rating or above in a particular zone, Priceline can’t allocate you a hotel there.

• You can only bid again if you change your requirements
  
  Priceline allows you to bid more than once within 24 hours only if you change your bid. However, adding another area to the list of ‘zones’ you’re willing to stay in counts as changing your requirements.

Thus the way to get extra bids is to manipulate this system...

Once a bid’s rejected, up your bid price, keeping your required zone(s) in, but now add a new zone that doesn’t have any hotels of the star grade you’re looking for, or above.

This way, you’re guaranteed that the only possible successful bid will be in the area you want. Thus to get lots of extra bids, find lots of areas without suitable hotels, and add them when you’re rejected.

How to find the right ‘dummy areas’ to add

Go to Priceline’s ‘name your own price’ section, and before bidding, plug in your dates and destination. At the ‘select the areas you want to stay’ stage, examine the list of zones, deciding which ones you want to stay in.

Next, tick one zone at a time, e.g. Regents Park, then click ‘next’, to reveal all available hotel star levels for that zone. The aim is to find areas which don’t have hotels of the grade you want to stay in or above; each of these is an extra bid for you. Obviously, if you’re staying in a place with few zones, there’s less room to play.

What if you get a counter offer?

After a rejected bid, Priceline may come back to you with a counter offer. Don’t accept it! It’s good news though, because it means you’re getting warmer. If you’ve extra bids left, a good rule of thumb is to bid halfway between your bid and the counter offer.

Mr Ivan Taholiday is the perfect example
Based on a real bid

Mr Ivan Taholiday is after a four star hotel in Los Angeles. He fancies staying in Beverly Hills or Downtown. He searches on Priceline and discovers that there are nine zones in Los Angeles, but only four – Beverly Hills, Downtown, Hollywood, and LA Airport – have four star hotels or above.

As Mr T would only be prepared to stay in Beverly Hills or Downtown, this means he’s got five extra chances to bid. The only boxes he should never tick are Hollywood and LA Airport: they have four star hotels, so he could be allocated there.

After searching on hotel comparison sites, the cheapest named four star hotel Mr T found was £110. Yet he spotted that people on Betterbidding were commonly winning four star hotels Downtown for just £40.

He starts bidding at £35, gets rejected, then upping his bid by £3, adding Culver City, which has no four star hotels, to the list of zones he would stay in. At that point he wins The Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown, at £38 a night. The cheapest rack rate for the hotel would have been £95.

Step 5. Contact the hotel with special requirements

Once all’s revealed, it’s worth contacting the hotel directly, with any special requirements i.e. twin beds. They don’t have to accommodate you, but will often oblige. Look the place up on Tripadvisor*, to see what’s in store.

If guests staying on the south side of the building complain of being awoken every morning by the sound of dumpster trucks, then ask for a room on the other side (this happened to MSE Jenny and she got a lovely quiet room on the top floor of the other side).