Priceline is a great money saver when planning your next travel. I consistantly save $100's when booking hotel and rental cars through them. But there are tricks and tips to get the best deal.
When Bidding for a hotel you should bid no more than 30 days in advance, as long as there is there is not a popular public event that causes hotels to sell out.
When bidding do your homework and research the location or zone you would like to be. Larger cities have many zones, for instance Orlando,FL has 11 zones.
Check our forum and others to get an idea of what hotels are on the priceline network and which star level they are. Also check for others feedback on the winning bid that they did recieve. This gives you a much better starting point of your bid.
Lets say you have choosen the Orlando area to vacation and you want to stay in the Disney facinity. You would like a resort property. Remember resort properties often charge a parking or resort daily charge that is usually about $15 per day. And also if you are booking a 4*(four star) property, they are often filled with a resort property. Most resort properties are 4* to 4.5*. As of this writing the common fills are the Omni, Gaylord Palms, Or the Hilton Resorts. Winning bids are running between $75-$100 per night. And these Resorts all retail for over $200 per night. Its a good idea also to check the resorts individual web sites. Most of them have interent only specials. A general rule would be to bid 25%-50% under those lowest advertised specials.
Of coarse everyone will want to enter their bid as low as they feel can get accepted. If you have 3 or 4 weeks ahead of your travel then you have plenty of time to enter a very low bid and then rebid upwards. Pricelines rule is that you can only rebid for the same zone and star level after 24 hours has past.
Now heres a loop-hole. For instance orland has 11 zones, only 2 of them offer resort catagories. You can easily see which zones have resots in them by clicking each zone one at a time and seeing if the resort button lights up. Therefore you are after Disney area with a resort. Say you start your bid at $65 and submit it and it gets declined. Now, most would think you have to wait 24 hours to rebid. But you can rebid now if you add a zone to your previous bid. Well, lets see - there are 9 zones that do not have resorts. So add one of those zones to your bid and raise your bid to $68. Because if you add a zone with no resorts in the offering, you are basically submitting the same bid as before as there is no possibility of getting accepted in the unwanted zone. So you submit $68 and it is decined again. Now you can just add one more of those no resort zones and so on. Basically you can bid 9 more times! And you should see an accept somewere in the $75-95 area according to your travel dates and season.
And even if you are choosing a smaller city with less zones to play with, if you have ample time you can just have your 24 hour time limit expire and then re-bid.
But do check our forum and post your results so we can build a nice database up to help others. And as others follow, we will get all the cities established.
