Priceline Hotel Bidding: How to Get Hotels at a Fraction of the Price
Priceline is very useful for getting nice hotels at a major discount. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve used Priceline hotel bidding to stay in hotels for a fraction of the going rate. When I drove from New Jersey to California on my way to graduate school, almost every hotel along the way was a Priceline hotel stay. When Samba for Miles and I went to Puerto Rico for Presidents’ Day weekend in 2011, we stayed at El Caribe Hilton for just $80 a night!
Priceline has a ‘Name Your Own Price’ option where you get to name the price you would pay for a certain level hotel in a certain location and hotels may accept it or decline it. I am going to explain how to figure out which hotels are in which zones and how to bid on Priceline hotels to get the lowest possible price!
As an example, I am going to through how I would look for a hotel in Ka’anapali beach in Maui. It’s a beautiful island I’ve already been to so I know the area well. And also, I love this picture of Anna jumping at Ka’anapali beach in Maui.
(Photo Credit: Dmitry Brodsky)
How Priceline Hotel Bidding with ‘Name Your Own Price’ Works
When you go to Priceline, you see an option to Name Your Own Price. After selecting this option, you are then asked to enter a location and your dates. Each location is split up into zones. If I search for Maui and type in my dates, I will be given four zones to choose from:
1. Ka’anapali – Lahaina (the beach in the picture!)
2. Kahului
3. Kihei
4. Wailea – Makena.
You are also given a map so you can see where the zones are located. You can bid on one or more zones at a time and you check the box for which zones you want to bid on.
As I said, I’ve been to Maui before so I want to stay on the Western side with the nice long beach and watch the sunset over the sea… This is Zone 1 and I would like to stay in a Resort in the beach.
Once you select your zones, you are then shown which Priceline hotel categories are available in those zones. Since Ka’anapali has a long stretch of hotels along the beach, selecting Zone 1 for Ka’anapali-Lahaina then allows me to bid on any category hotel: from 1 Star Economy to 4-Star Deluxe and also Resorts.
If I instead select Kihei, I don’t get the option to bid on 4 Star Hotels or Resorts since Priceline does not actually have any 4 Star Hotels or Resorts in Kihei. Note that when you select a category, you are bidding on all hotels that are in at least that category. So if you select a 3 Star Hotel, you may actually get a 3 1/2 or 4 Star Hotel.
You then enter a bid for each night.
This is exclusive of taxes. The total price you will pay if your bid is accepted is shown to you on the next page. You then enter your credit card information to pay for the room.
If your bid is accepted, you then find out the name of your hotel and your credit card is charged. All bookings are then final. No refunds, no cancellations, no transfers. The rate is fully prepaid. So you have to be very sure of your travel plans before you accept a hotel on Priceline. You also cannot make guaranteed special requests for your room. Since you’re paying much lower than the going rate, you can’t request an ocean view. But given the rates I have paid with Priceline at these hotels, it is more than worth it!
Doing things this way and keeping the hotel name hidden until you’ve paid lets hotels secretly offer lower rates for times they may have empty rooms. They would rather sell their empty rooms at a discount than have them sitting around empty. But that doesn’t mean you can only use Priceline during low travel periods. Many times, I have gotten rooms when the hotel was fully sold out. As I said, we went to Puerto Rico over President’s Day weekend. This is definitely a peak travel period and we still got a room for $80 a night. Not only that, but we had a pretty good idea where we may be staying by using the BiddingForTravel website.
BiddingForTravel: Priceline Hotels Revealed and Deciding How Much to Bid
No one likes bidding in the dark and having no idea at which hotel one may end up. Fortunately, with BiddingForTravel, that’s never the case with Priceline hotel bidding.
BiddingForTravel is a message board where people report their hotel bidding results for using Priceline. The moderators keep an active list of hotels in each zone that you can use as a reference point for your bids.
It is a crucial source of data for bidding. The first important use is finding out which hotels Priceline actually has in certain zones. If we go to the board under Maui and click on MAUI HOTEL LIST, we see a list of hotels with winning bids in every zone.
The Kaanapali zone has four resorts: Hyatt, Sheraton, Westin and The Whaler. Since the Whaler hasn’ t been reported in 5-6 years, we can consider this hotel unlikely to come up in our bids. I personally stayed at the Hyatt when I was in Maui and it’s a very nicely laid out hotel with gardens, a swan pond for breakfast and views of the sea.
Secondly, we can find out through BiddingForTravel.com which hotels people are actually winning and what are the winning bids. Looking through the messages, we see that people are mostly getting the Hyatt and there are a few Westins here and there. The bids seem to range from $120 to $180 a night depending on dates.
If I were to bid on a Resort Hotel in Ka’anapali, I would try to start my bids at $100 and raise it by $10 so I can get the lowest price. But before we enter any bids, we need to go over the Priceline Hotel Bidding Rules…
The Priceline Hotel Bidding Rules
Priceline has a few restrictions for bidding. Basically, you can’t just choose a zone, start at $1 and then inch up your price $1 at a time to get the lowest possible price. You are only allowed one instance of a bid in a particular category and zone per 24 hours. If you want to bid more than once, you need to change one of the specifications in your bid other than price. Changing a bid includes:
- Adding a hotel zone to your bid: You cannot subtract a hotel zone. You must only add one. So if you bid on Ka’anapali and Kihei, you cannot then bid on just Ka’anapali. You can, however, bid on Ka’anapali, Kihei and Kahului.
- Changing the dates of the stay.
- Lowering the hotel category: Again, you cannot raise the hotel category. You can only lower it.
With all these restrictions, if I want to start bidding for a Resort in Ka’anapali at $100, it may take me a long time. Fortunately, there are a few good tricks around these rules…
Bidding More Than Once Within a 24 Hour Period
In my Maui example, bidding on resorts in Ka’anapali and then bidding on resorts in Kaanapali and Kihei are considered different bids. I want a Resort Hotel in Ka’anapali. When I check the Kihei or Kahului by itself, the highest category hotel available in each of theze zones is actually 3 Star. This means Priceline does not have any resort hotels in Kihei or Kahului.
I can use this information to my advantage. Because there are no Resort Hotels in Kihei or Kahului, if I bid on either of these zones together with Kaanapali and get a Resort Hotel there, it will have to be in Kaanapali. So bidding on a Resort Hotel in Kaanapali + Kihei is exactly the same as bidding on a Resort Hotel in just Kaanapali. This essentially lets me bid on Kaanapali four times in a 24 hour period.
- Bid 1: Kaanapali
- Bid 2: Kaanapali + Kihei
- Bid 3: Kaanapali + Kahului
- Bid 4: Kaanapali + Kihei + Kahului
I just have to be careful not to add the last Wailea-Makena zone since that zone actually does have Resort Hotels.
If I want to start at $100 and move up my bid $10 every time until I get to $200, it will take me 11 bids. If I only bid once per 24 hours, that would take 11 days. No one wants to spend almost two weeks bidding hotels with Priceline! But, if I can bid 4 times a day, it will only take 3 days to find out whether I can get the Hyatt, Westin or Sheraton in Ka’anapali for $200.
Checking Hotel Rates
I always like to check hotel rates so I know how much hotels are actually going for at full price during my dates. I like to use HotelsCombined for this. It searches 30+ booking sites and aggregates the rates from the popular hotel booking sites like Expedia, Orbitz, Bookit, Travelocity, etc. It’s definitely a good quick way to find out what I would be paying without using Priceline’s ‘Name Your Own Price’ function.
So you can check the price of the Hyatt in Maui before you bid.
Summary
- Priceline allows you to bid on hotels by Naming Your Own Price for hotels in locations by zone. Hotels in that zone may accept your bids, offering you the chance to stay at top hotels at a fraction of the price.
- You can use BiddingForTravel to get recent data on Priceline bidding. This lets you narrow down hotels in different zones and decide on the price to bid.
- While you can only technically bid on a particular hotel category in a particular zone once per 24 hours, there are tricks to help get around this and enter multiple bids.
- Putting all these strategies together lets you get a hotel at the lowest price and often a fraction of the cost!
That’s it for this post, but I haven’t told you everything yet… in Part 2, I reveal how you can actually find out the lowest price Priceline will take before you commit to book with Priceline:
Priceline Hotel Bidding: Trick to Find out the Secret Lowest Price Without Paying
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Another very helpful post. I have used Priceline before and have implemented some of these strategies but appreciate the overview and the specific suggestions of how to make the most of your bids. I suppose one could also open more than one Priceline account using different email addresses. I have also used Hotwire. Do you (or do any readers) have any thoughts on Hotwire vs.Priceline?
I also use Hotwire on a regular basis! Hotwire doesn’t let you enter your own price the way Priceline does, but it does give more information about the hotel itself so you can often figure out the identity of the hidden hotel exactly. You can frequently get a lower price on Priceline than you can on Hotwire, though there are exceptions, and it is sometimes worth it to pay a little more to know the identity of the hotel. I tend to first check prices on Hotwire as often the price on Hotwire is a price the same hotel is willing to take on Priceline. I am actually going to do a whole post on Hotwire too explaining where to get information on the hotel identity.
You don’t actually need an account with Priceline to bid, but Priceline does use cookies and tracking to limit your bids. I’ve also had to use a different credit card and email address. There are technical ways to get more bids in around cookies and tracking and, now that you mention it, I can explain these all in my next Priceline post. This post is all about following the rules… the next one will be about breaking them! ;)
I trust your next Priceline tutorial will discuss the risk free re-bid, yes?
So the re-bid I discussed here is when you add a zone that doesn’t have a particular hotel category. You get a rebid that way. Is this what you are referring to?