It's possible to get mammoth discounts on hotels in New York, LA, Barcelona and more, using a sneaky trick to beat US site Priceline's bidding system.
Done right, this is a superb way to get the highest end hotel possible within your budget, especially useful if you're not desperate to stay at a particular place. One MoneySaver bagged nearly a week at New York's luxury Time Square Sheraton for £330, rather than usual £1,200.
In This Guide
How much can you save?
The technique's simple, but you'll need to spend a few minutes understanding it, so here's a little inspiration ...
"We bagged six nights at the Sheraton Manhattan Times Square for £336 – that’s £55 a night. To book direct with the hotel would've cost £1,230 or £205 per night, so my whole trip, including flights, was cheaper than I would have paid for the hotel alone."
"I got the 4* Hyatt Regency Century plaza in LA. Two rooms, two nights was £335 instead of £653 with Expedia! I started at £58 and worked up, adding areas with no 4* hotels. 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)."
It worked for Martin too!
For New York hotels I paid 63% of a comparison site's cheapest for the same deal. Yet the time-saving was also cracking. Picking a hotel can be a nightmare, as you look on review sites and for every three 'it's the most amazing place I've ever been' posts, two say 'avoid like the plague'.
This way, the decision is made for you and at a decent price, so even if it's awful, at least it wasn't overpriced and awful." - Martin
For further inspiration add your story/read others in the Priceline Success Thread.
How Priceline's name your price function works
Giant US site Priceline lets you book hotels in the normal manner, but, for that, better bets are comparison sites like Trivago, Travelsupermarket* or Tripadvisor*. Where Priceline comes into its own is its name your price function, which works as follows:
-
Select where you want to stay
Simply select the location and area you want to stay in.
-
Tell it the hotel class
Priceline follows its own star rating system, so in some cities, eg, New York, super-luxury pads are 4*, not 5*. One thing you can't select is whether the bed is king or double or a smoking or non-smoking room (in countries where smoking's allowed). Yet, once booked, you can email the hotel to request these. -
Pick your price
Tell it how much you're willing to pay (bid) for a room per night. It gives a guide price based on the criteria you've selected. Then it checks if any of the hotels it covers will accept your price. If you don't win, you don't pay anything.
You pay a little extra for taxes, but Priceline clearly displays these before you pay.
-
Wait to see if the bid's successful
If the bid wins, the hotel's yours at the price selected. If not, you're supposed to wait a day to put in another bid (see the loophole below for how to get round this).
Yet the most important thing to understand about this system is …
Put your bid in and you’re committed.
If it's acccepted, there's no going back.
It works because hotels can offer discounts on unsold rooms without publicising it, so normal clients don't know a discount's possible. Plus you can't get a refund, so they guarantee a sale.
How to beat the system
While the system is already competitive and can lead to some good deals, there is a way to beat the system.
The aim's to put in a bid at the minimum price the hotels will accept to get the maximum bargain.
To hit that, the natural thing would be put in a low bid, eg, £20 for a top hotel, and, 
if it's rejected, increase it to £30, then £40 and keep going until it works, so Priceline gives you its lowest possible price.
Yet the Priceline system stops this, because it allows one bid per day. However, there's a workaround. Thanks to all those MoneySavers, especially Blindman (see his Priceline bidding guide), for lots of tips and info.
Get more than one bid per day
Once you know your maximum price, the key to the extra bid Priceline system is to do grab more extra bids, and there are a number of ways to do this.
-
Do it with your partner
If you travel with a friend or partner, provided you've both separate emails and have different payment cards, you double the number of possible bids.
-
Start with a deliberately narrow area and add more
Many cities are split up into a number of different areas. New York, for example, has 15 different ‘zones’, and the main Manhattan island’s split into 13. If your bid’s rejected, you’re allowed to rebid, provided you add an area.
So start off with a relatively low bid in another area you want to stay in, then increase it. The more areas the city’s divided into, the further you can finesse each price increase.
Click the maps below to see where this works best. (Hover over the pins to see how many zones each city has.)
City | No. Of Zones | City | No. Of Zones |
|---|---|---|---|
Atlanta |
22 |
Houston | 24 |
San Diego |
16 |
Miami | 15 |
Las Vegas |
15 |
Toronto | 15 |
New York |
15 |
Washington DC | 14 |
Orlando |
13 |
Seattle | 13 |
Boston |
11 |
San Francisco | 12 |
London |
13 |
Southhampton US | 11 |
Chicago |
11 |
Los Angeles | 10 |
Honolulu |
9 |
New Orleans | 8 |
Paris |
8 |
Atlantic City | 6 |
Niagara Falls |
5 |
Norwich, USA | 7 |
Tokyo |
7 |
Hong Kong | 6 | Mexico City |
6 |
Singapore | 6 |
Rome |
5 |
Madrid | 4 |
Seoul |
4 |
Beijing | 4 |
Dublin |
4 |
Vienna | 4 |
Barcelona |
4 |
Berlin | 4 |
Prague |
3 |
Shanghai | 3 |
Amsterdam |
3 |
Bangkok | 3 |
Edinburgh | 3 | Melbourne | 3 |
-
Lower your star class
An alternative to lowering the bid if you're on a strict budget, is to keep the bid the same (or even go slightly lower) and drop the star class you're looking at, to see if it's accepted.
Priceline allows you to drop by half a star level, so this is a handy technique.
-
See how well you did
Look the place up on Tripadvisor*, to see what’s in-store and check what's said about the hotel.
The Advanced Priceline System
This fairly simple system above gives you more bids than otherwise, and should help cut the price down to a decent level. However, if you're willing to play slightly more, there's a super-advanced approach that finesses your search.
See how to check what hotel you’re likely to get and avoid hellholes, plus exploit Priceline’s ‘counter offers’ to hit the lowest possible price.
The Full Advanced Priceline System
-
Step 1. Benchmark the price
Work out you budget and use comparison sites like Trivago, Travelsupermarket* or Tripadvisor* to get an idea of what that can get you (or use Cheap Hotels guide for more).
-
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 shabby establishments.
Go to Tripadvisor* or Google and search for the city/place and the word Priceline, eg 'San Francisco Priceline'. The search usually generates a list of Priceline bookers' reviews. Alternatively, 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 do list a few in Europe. Search for your destination to see which hotels people are bagging. Again, these are not comprehensive, but a fab guide.
-
Step 3. 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 4. 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 5. 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 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’, eg, 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, ie, three star to four star, you can’t be 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 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, eg, Regents Park, then click ‘next’, to reveal all available hotel star levels for that zone. The aim's to find areas that 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, eg, you can get the hotel if you bid £23 more. 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.
How it works in practice
Case Study - Mr Ivan Taholiday (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.
Will the big freeze hit energy bills?
Benefit cap 'could hurt couples'
OFT launches investigation into gym contracts
House prices 'still falling slightly'
Amex ups credit card cashback to 5%
A warning to freelancers and the self-employed everywhere
A dragon in the Napoleonic wars
Student loans will be interest free for many 2012 starters
Why I confidently predict this recession won't be as 'severe' as the last
“MoneySavingExpert: a stronger brand than iTunes”
