How to
Book Hotels for the lowest rate through Priceline.com
Save massively by following these
guidelines
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Whether you're staying for business or pleasure, if you
book your hotel through Priceline you could massively save
on the cost of your hotel stay.
Part 1 of a series on How
to book hotels at the lowest price on Priceline - please
also visit
1.
An introduction to Priceline
2. How much to bid
3. How to rebid in less than 24 hrs
4. The true cost of a Priceline bid
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Bidding for hotel stays on
Priceline can get you better values than any other
way of booking hotel rooms.
The trade-off is that you don't
know what hotel you will get, and you don't know what the best
rate to bid is.
But if you follow the suggested
steps below, you'll know much more before you commit yourself to
a bid, and be able to bid much lower, giving you more comfort up
front and better rates for your hotel stays.
What Priceline Is and Does
Priceline has evolved over
time, and these days there are two sides to its service.
The first side is a
traditional website travel booking service, and this is very
similar to other websites such as Orbitz and Expedia. It
warrants no further discussion.
The unique second side to
Priceline is its 'Name Your
Own Price' service. This applies to airfares, rental car
bookings, and hotel reservations. In this article, we
consider the hotel part of Priceline's service and how to get
outstanding bargains when booking hotels through their service.
Stated simply, Priceline
allows
hotels to sell their rooms, on a semi-secret basis, at lower
rates than they otherwise would or could, by offering them for
sale to you in an innovative way where you only find out the
hotel you have booked after you've paid for it.
Priceline also
imposes stricter terms and conditions on bookings, but in return
for the stricter terms/conditions, and not knowing up front
what hotel you'll get, you have a chance to get hotels for much
less than normal price.
Which hotels can be booked
through Priceline
No-one knows exactly which hotels
use Priceline at any time and which hotels do not.
I've seen just about all the
major chains (such as Hilton, Holiday Inn, Hyatt, Marriott,
Renaissance, Sheraton, Westin) plus smaller regional hotel
groups and individual unaffiliated hotels all appear in winning
bids.
But the hotel you'll get
when your bid is accepted - that is anyone's guess (unless
you're bidding in an area with only one participating hotel).
However these two websites
have moderately accurate and moderately up to date lists of
hotels that have been known to be sold through Priceline -
BetterBidding.com and
BiddingForTravel.com. This gives you some information,
but do understand that some of the hotels on their lists may no
longer be available through Priceline, and - vice versa - some
hotels not on their lists may now be available.
The Pluses and Minuses of Using
Priceline
Priceline is deliberately
designed so as not to appeal to all travelers all the time.
If Priceline was a 100% solution for all people and all travel needs,
then no-one would ever pay full price for a hotel room. So,
just like airlines add restrictions to narrow the appeal of
their lowest fares, so too does
Priceline necessarily have some 'swings and roundabouts' so as to
limit its appeal.
Plus = Price
The biggest plus of course
is you're getting a hotel room for - potentially -
less than half the rate you'd find it anywhere else.
But please note the stress
on the word 'potentially'. There is no guarantee that
you'll get a room at all on Priceline, and if you do get a room,
there is no guarantee it will be for less than full price.
In November 2010 I attempted to book a room through Priceline
for a four night stay in Hong Kong, and after getting all my
bids from $85 up to $140/night refused, I ended up directly
booking a very nice hotel (Butterfly on Wellington) directly for
$134/night.
This is actually more than a
$6 differential, because Priceline adds a profit margin of its
own to your bid price.
The potential for a cost
saving
is not only the biggest plus for Priceline; it is also the
only plus. All the other considerations are minuses to
some degree or another.
Minus = Can't choose a hotel
The biggest minus factor,
if you bid for a hotel room on Priceline, is that you don't know
what hotel you might get, or where it will be.
Sure - that sounds like a
huge minus, doesn't it. But it isn't as bad as it
sounds. While you can neither specify the hotel you want
to stay at, nor can you specify any hotels you do not want to
stay at, you can specify the star/quality category of the hotel
you wish, and that reasonably takes care of quality controlling
your stay.
Minus = Location imprecision
As for the location,
generally Priceline will divide a city or destination area into
smaller zones, so you can specify in which part of the city you
wish to stay.
For example, if you wanted
to stay in New York city, you would have a choice of 12
different zones that you could select (or not select) within
which hotels would be offered to you - ten on Manhattan itself,
and two more adjacent (Brooklyn and Long Island City).
There are additional zones going further out from there (such as
Newark or Westchester County).
The size of a zone varies -
using New York city as an example again, the smallest zone is the Times
Square/Theatre District zone, which covers a small area from W
42nd St up to W 51st St, and from 6th Ave to 8th Ave.
Other zones can be much larger, and all are displayed on a
helpful map so you know exactly what part of town each zone
covers.
So while there is some
degree of imprecision about choosing a hotel's location, you can
still exercise a certain degree of choice, and if you are
choosing the best hotel categories, you can be reasonably
certain that an upmarket hotel will be of course reasonably well
situated.
Minus = No frequent
flier/guest credit
A small minus is that you
probably won't get any credit for your stay added to any frequent
guest/flier program.
Minus = No perks if you're a
premium level frequent guest member
In theory, if you're a
premium/elite member of the hotel's frequent guest program, you
won't get any of the perks or free upgrades you'd normally get.
It seems that Marriott may
be an exception to this rule, and of course, when you're
checking in, you should always show your membership card if you
are a premium member of any hotel's program - it might not get
you everything you'd get if paying full price, but it might get
you some sort of halfway level of perks.
Minus = Pay up front and no
cancel/changes allowed
One other possible issue is
that you have to pay for your hotel stay immediately. If
you subsequently wish to cancel or change the dates of your
stay, you're out of luck. Your entire booking is
non-refundable and unchangeable. You 'use it or you lose
it'.
Minus = Can't request special
room types/features
Maybe it is very important
for you that you get a non-smoking room (or, for that matter, a
smoking room). Maybe there are two of you staying in the
room and you want to have specific bedding - one large bed or
two separate beds.
You can't specify any of
these issues when making your bid, or make any other types of
special requests. All you can do is
directly make such requests to the hotel after you've bought and
paid for the room (best to do this before you arrive), but if the hotel can not or will not help you
with your request, you can't ask for a refund back from
Priceline.
Minus = Can't book multiple
rooms for different dates
The good news is you can
book multiple rooms (up to as many as nine) for exactly the same arrival and departure
dates, but if you want to have one room for perhaps two nights
and a second room for three nights, you can't do this.
Sure, you could try first
doing the booking for three nights, then making an identical
second booking for two nights, but there is a slight risk you
might end up with two bookings at two different hotels.
Neutral = Hotel upgrades
This is probably a 'plus'
for most people - if you select a grade of hotel, Priceline
reserves the ability to provide you with a hotel in that
category or in any higher category. It is a nice thought
that you might get a 'free' upgrade to a better hotel.
On the other hand, if you're
trying to carefully limit the hotels you do or don't get placed
in, this feature makes it harder for you to control which hotels
you might end up finding yourself staying at.
Who Should Use Priceline
After having read the
preceding section on the pluses and minuses of Priceline, you
probably are starting to get a feeling for if Priceline and its
terms/conditions is a good choice for you or not.
Priceline has been designed
to not appeal to corporate travelers, but in actuality, even
business travelers can find Priceline offers great deals.
The biggest downsides to Priceline are
-
You can't choose the hotel
you stay at, and you must accept the hotel Priceline finds
for you.
-
You can't change or cancel
your stay (but sometimes you can extend it). You pay
the full cost of the hotel stay up front and it is
non-refundable.
If you might need to change or
cancel your booking, Priceline could be a mistake. But
if/when you can commit to your travels, consider first the
minuses above, and if they're not deal breakers, then a
Priceline booking might be your best choice.
Priceline is good if you
understand and accept their rules
So, if you can live with
these two challenges, maybe Priceline is a good choice.
Some people dislike Priceline, and some have complained
vociferously about it, even to the Better Business Bureau.
But these are almost always people who chose to not understand
what Priceline does and how. Typically, they objected to
finding that the bid they voluntarily made was accepted and that
they couldn't then withdraw the bid.
As long as you understand
the issues up front (and Priceline makes all their terms and
conditions obvious - all you have to do is
read them!), you should have no problems with Priceline.
Best for 3½ and 4 star hotels
Because a 50% saving on a
$200/nt hotel room is more valuable than a 50% saving on a $50/nt
hotel room, Priceline works best if you're wanting to stay at a
reasonably good hotel.
If you're looking for the
very cheapest hotel, you'll find that the Priceline savings are
necessarily smaller, and the trade-offs may be greater.
Let's face it - most four star hotels are reliably good, and
none are really bad, but if you're looking for a budget motel,
you might find yourself at a property that isn't what you were
hoping for if you just have to accept Priceline's choice.
Better then to carefully pick and choose the hotel from other
more traditional information and booking sources.
Another perspective here
could be that the saving in cost you'll get through Priceline
will more than pay for one or more stars of upgraded hotel
quality.
Better for shorter stays
Hotels typically have a
combination of some nights with lots of empty rooms and some
nights when they're more full. A short stay of one or two (or
three) nights gives you a better chance of finding a hotel with
low rates for all the nights you need than is the case with a
longer stay.
If a hotel has a higher rate
for even only one of the multiple nights you need, then
Priceline can not give you a blended rate, with some nights low
and some high - instead it will set all nights at the highest
possible rate.
So in general, the longer
your hotel stay, the higher the nightly rate may be. There
is one rare exception to this - hotels that have lower rates for
eg full week stays, but for most of us, we'll find Priceline
works best for shorter stays.
Read more in the rest of this
series
This is part 1 of a series on
How
to book hotels at the lowest price on Priceline - please
also visit
1.
An introduction to Priceline
2. How much to bid
3. How to rebid in less than 24 hrs
4. The true cost of a Priceline bid
Related Articles, etc
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Originally published
14 Aug 2009, last update
30 May 2021
You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer.
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