Site Features:
Name your own price and retail airline tickets, hotels, rental cars.
Retail cruises, rentals, hotels (merchant rates that are specially
negotiated as well as regular travel agency rates) and vacation packages.
Site Report:
The travelsites team has been using priceline air, hotel and rental car since they were launched, and after all this time, we're experts about using the system. It's almost like we built it ourselves!
The air and car product are simply about good information. Check your markets and the other OTAs and you can get a great deal. The trick is to know how to bid. For a refresher, click here and read the
priceline air report.
Although air is about studying, hotels is the one
priceline subject that you can cheat a little bit on.
And the way to get your priceline hotels on the cheap is called the free re-bid.
Most hotels sold at priceline are 3 or 4 star hotels. For this review, we're going to assume that you're looking at a stay in a 4 star hotel.
Many of the cities that you'll be travelling to in priceline have been broken up into "zones" -- arbitrary geographic areas of the city that the priceline folks made up to hide the names of the hotels in their system. Unfortunately, there are sites that were built up over the years to out just such information.
One site that many priceline devotees use is called biddingfortravel.com and another is called betterbidding.com. Both of these will tell you exactly how to find the zones that don't have 3 or 4 star hotels in them -- giving you the free re-bid.
You do need to know where the hotel you'd like to stay is located, and you need to know where that hotel is in the city zones at priceline. If you know that, the rest is easy.
Let's take a look at how it works:
in the city you're going to,
priceline has 4 Zones. Your research at biddingfortravel tells
you the following information
Zone 1: Has 4* Hotels
Zone 2: Nothing 4* or above
Zone 3: Nothing 4* or above
Zone 4: Nothing 4* or above
If you start with Zone A at a reasonable amount -- 40% off of the Expedia price for the hotel that you'd like to stay in -- you're off to a good start.
After that first bid, you can simply add zones in succession while raising your price in $5 increments - after a few keystrokes you'll have that low price hotel zen feeling!
One thing though... though you can do your research at biddingfortravel for zone rebid information, please make your bid for priceline
hotels through
this link or we'll go hungry!
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