Scoring Cheap Hotel Rooms
A couple of times each year, two or three of my friends and I will end up taking a weekend trip somewhere to explore a city for a few days. We are always on foot — so always relying on public transportation — and definitely prefer to stay in the “heart” of a city for both convenience and experience. Thus part of the planning for these trips inevitably involves trying to arrange a hotel room. Unfortunately, hotel rooms in “the heart” of a city can often be quite expensive.
Sometimes I have found you can get lucky using a normal travel search engine — Travelocity, Hotels.com, Expedia, etc. — but these days I find myself frequently turning to William Shatner for help.
Enter Priceline
Well, not quite William Shatner, but the company for which he is a spokesman — Priceline.com. You may have seen their television advertisements, where they talk about “naming your own price” for hotel bookings. Priceline also offers airfare, but I’m going to focus on bidding for hotels. Priceline’s system is simple — they break their hotels into geographic categories (in New York City, for example, the categories incldue Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Times Square, Downtown-Soho, etc.), as well as star-quality rating (1 star through 4 stars).
To try to name your own price, go to Priceline’s website, click on “Name your own Price”, and tell it the city, dates, and number of rooms you are looking for. You’ll then be taken to a page where you specify which areas in your city you want to try to bid for, as well as the hotel star-quality level. You then name your own price, and click submit. Because of the auction nature of the site, you have to provide your credit card information upfront, because if the bid is accepted you will be charged immediately. If your bid is not successful, you will not be charged, and can rebid after a day or two.
The Power of the Internet
Believe it or not, Priceline’s claim that you can “save up to 50%” is not a lie — I have gotten some tremendous deals on four-star luxury hotels in the heart of cities like New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and San Fransisco that often cost me less than booking a room at someplace like a Holiday Inn Express. The challenge, though, is knowing what price to bid — if you bid too low, you obviously won’t get a room; on the flip side, if you bid too high, you’ll end up paying more than you might otherwise have to.
This is where the power of the internet comes into play: there are several websites on the internet that aggregate people’s successful bids through Priceline, most prominently at BiddingForTravel.com and BetterBidding.com. I prefer BiddingForTravel.com; if you’re looking for a hotel room in Manhattan, you can click on the “New York State – New York City” link to see at what prices people have been successful at getting hotels (remember, when looking at BiddingForTravel, you want to pay attention only to successful bids in the zone and quality level you’re looking for). Using this information, you can get a general idea as to what price range you should aim for. Keep in mind, though, that past preformance is no guarantee of future results.
Using Priceline in advance has its advantages — you can start your bidding lower and slowly bid up if you have several days or weeks before you need a hotel. If you have less time, you’ll have to be more careful with how low you bid.
One of the very nice things about BiddingForTravel is that each geographic category contains a list of what hotels are thought to be in each category, so that you have an idea of what kind of hotel you might end up in. Keep in mind that these lists are user-compiled — the official list is kept secret by Priceline and can change regularly — nevertheless, it can be useful when making decisions.
The Secret Trick: The Free Rebid
Obviously, Priceline has to have some sort of limit on how often you can bid, or else you could just start at $0.01 and work your way up until it accepts your bid. So Priceline has a rule where you can only bid every twenty-four hours. However, Priceline will let you rebid immediately if you add another “zone” within your region, and that fact opens the door for the “free rebid” trick.
The “free rebid” trick relies on the fact that you can rebid for free at a higher price immediately if you add a zone — even if that zone only has lower quality hotel rooms. So say you are trying to get a four-star hotel in the Times Square – Theater District of NYC; if your first bid is rejected, you can add the “ zone and rebid for the same four stars. I don’t want to stay in the Upper East Side, but since the Upper East Side does not have any four star hotels, even though I selected both Times Square and Upper East Side, since I selected four stars, if I win at the higher price, the four-star hotel is guaranteed to be in the Times Square area.
A couple of tips with this:
- It can be confusing to understand exactly how this works — it took me a few experiences to truly get the hang of it. If you’re still confused, try reading Matt Markovitch’s excellent article on “How to beat Priceline” form Seattle KOMO 4 News, or check out Matt Vance’s article on “How to book a five star hotel on a budget” over at Lifehacker.
- BiddingForTravel has an excellent guide to how the “Free Rebid” works, too. Read around a bit before trying to execute the free rebid strategy.
- The key to the free-rebid is knowing how high each zone in your city goes — and you can do this at the very beginning on the page where you first select your zones. When you select a zone, it will automatically gray out any star levels that are not available. Remember to uncheck the zone before checking a new zone, or you’ll get combined results!
- Also, remember that you’re looking for how low the *highest* available quality in a zone is, not whether or not your specific star-level is available in a zone. So if you are looking for a three star hotel, adding a zone that has a four star hotel means that there is a chance you could get that four star hotel in the zone you don’t want. Only add free rebid zones that have no hotels at or above your desired quality level.
Some Final Thoughts
A few warnings:
- You can’t “bid for fun” — placing a bid requires a credit card and is a binding agreement to pay the price if Priceline accepts it. You can’t back out. If they don’t accept the bid, you don’t get charged. If you’re simply looking to see what price you might get, take a look at BiddingforTravel or BetterBidding.
- Pay attention to what zones and quality levels you’re looking at! I’ve accidentally bid for the wrong zone or quality level before, and you’re out of luck if the bid goes through.
- Priceline simply guarantees that you’ll get a hotel room — you have virtually no control over the type of hotel room, the number of beds, the size of the bed, etc. Some hotels are accommodating, but some are not (afterall, they’re not getting much money off your rate). So if you absolutely need two beds, you might want to consider simply booking a normal hotel room.
- Priceline requires you to be 21 to bid. In reality, you can bid regardless, and often get away with it. The problem is that some hotels require you to be 21 in order to rent a room, and since you have no control over the hotel you get in a category, if you get a hotel that requires you to be 21, you may be out of luck. Its safe to assume you need to be 18 regardless
Have fun with this! I really have gotten some amazing deals. The best discounts are available on the four-star luxury hotels. I’ve been able to stay at very nice hotels in great locations for rates that are significantly less than much-poorer-quality hotels.
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