George Taylor McKnight

Priceline for PROs

There are only three things that matter when you are Pricelining hotels:
Price, Location, and Hotel Rating.

Determining a Price Check out the non-bidding pages of Priceline or sites like Kayak. Then browse BiddingForTravel’s Hotel page to see other people’s actual winning bids.

Bidding & Rebidding If your first bid is accepted you probably bid too high. The key is taking advantage of ‘free’ re-bids.

In order to re-bid, you have to change at least one parameter of your bid like adding a zone, changing the quality level, or changing the checkin/checkout date. Once you have exhausted all of those, you must wait 24 hours before bidding again.

What if you just want to slowly increase your price without sacrificing your location/rating? A free re-bid is adding a zone that only has a lower quality level than you are bidding, to a rejected bid.

For example:
1) I bid $55 on Zone A / 4* / Downtown and it is rejected.
2) I add Zone B (which only has 3* hotels in it..more on that in a minute), keep Downtown, and raise my price to $60.

All I actually changed was my price from $55 to $60.
This is the only way you can find the actual price floor of a hotel instead of randomly shooting in the dark.

Finding which zones offer which star levels on Priceline
Quick, lazy, sometimes unreliable way: Biddingfortravel boards which list the hotels/ratings that are usually included in zones. I say unreliable because Priceline adds/removes hotels sometimes on a whim.

Completely reliable way: On Priceline’s bidding map page, place a check mark in the box of the zone as though you were going to bid that zone. Note the highest quality level offered in that zone. Then uncheck the zone and repeat for each zone and note the highest quality level offered in that zone. When performing this check, make sure the checkin date is not the current date, or you will not be able to check the zones that do not offer same day bidding.

For the even more advanced, check out using permutations to maximize available free re-bids. Heavily sourced/reworded from BiddingForTravel’s Hotel FAQ.

I just used the above technique to score a 3.5* hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans for $55!