TravelStrategies:*Priceline Bidding Strategies

  Hotel Strategies

With “Name Your Own Price Hotels” at Priceline, you bid for your hotel, rather than paying a set price. If your bid is high enough, your hotel is booked automatically. If your bid is too low, you won’t get the hotel.

To stop you from starting low, and then just continuously increasing your bid, Priceline limits you to a single bid in any two hour time period (it used to be 24 hours). Otherwise, you could just bid $1, then $2, until you got the hotel (at the lowest possible price), or until the price reached the upper-limit that you were willing to pay.

However, if you know what you are doing, you can take advantage of “free rebids” to bid multiple times in a row—allowing you to try out a larger number of different prices, and get the hotel at closer to the lowest possible price.

Sure, we’re happy to get a $200 per night hotel for only $125; but we’re even happier to get it at $105.

Take advantage of “free rebids” to bid multiple times in a row

Priceline is designed to let you rebid if you add another zone to the list of zones you are bidding on. The “free rebid” trick relies on adding zones that only have low-rated hotels. If you are bidding on a higher-rated hotel, you’ve got no chance of actually getting one of the hotels in the newly added zone. But, because you added a zone, even a zone with no valid hotels in your star rating, you are entitled to another bid.

For example, let’s say you are going to Maui and you decided that you want to bid on 4-star or better hotels in the central Ka’anapali zone, knowing that you are likely to get the Maui, Westin, or Hyatt. Maui has a total of six zones, but only three of them have 4-star hotels. You can add any of the other three zones (which don’t have any 4-star or higher hotels) to your bidding request, without changing the actual hotels you are bidding on. You now get four bids per session, instead of one. (With a more complicated approach, described below, you can get up to 8 bids.)

Or if you were visiting Chicago and want to stay in a 4-star hotel, there are sixteen zones. Of these, eight don’t have any 4-star or better hotels. So, you can easily bid nine times in a row, by just adding one new low-rated zone for each request (or up to 256 times with the complicated method!).

Step-by-step guide to getting multiple bids

1. Before you start bidding, determine all the “free rebid zones”. If you are planning on bidding for a 4-star hotel, you are looking for all the zones that don’t have 4-star or higher hotels. If you are planning on bidding on a 3½-star hotel, you are looking for all the zones that don’t have any 3½ star or higher hotels.

Click on each checkbox one after the other. If the star category you are planning to bid on lights up, uncheck the box, and move on to the next zone in the list. When you are done, you will have temporarily selected all the zones that you can use for rebids. In the example below, you can see three selected zones, none of which have a 4-star or higher hotel.


2. Write these zones down (or print the webpage), so you know which ones to add later.
3. Put in your low starting bid for just the zone that you actually want. Make sure to uncheck all the free rebid zones that were checked when you were looking for safe zones (in step 1).

4. Assuming you bid too low, Priceline will tell you your bid wasn’t accepted, and give you an opportunity to re-submit your bid. They will suggest that you add a zone, which is exactly what you are going to do.

5. Add one of the free re-bid zones that you identified earlier (in step 1), increase your bid, and try again. The amount to increase your bid depends on how much time you want to spend, versus how close to the lowest possible price you are trying to get. The larger the increment, the larger the amount you might be “overpaying”, but the fewer number of bids you’ll need to make. For example, if you are willing to pay $120, and you are starting at $60, you could increase your bids up to six times at $10 per time, and have the possibility of paying $9 more than the lowest possible rate. Or you could increase your bid up to 12 times at $5 per time, with the possibility of paying $4 more than the lowest possible rate. Remember that you can come back later and restart the bidding, so you don’t necessarily have to finish in a single session.

6. Repeat, as necessary. If you run out of free rebid zones, you’ll need to start over at Step 3 in a few hours.

Knowing what bid to start with

Remember, you want your first bid to probably be rejected (otherwise you might have bid too much), you want to gradually increase your bid until it is accepted, and you want to get to the right price in a reasonable amount of time. If you have extra time before you need to make a reservation, and you don’t mind spending more time bidding, you could always plan to increase your bid more gradually, and spread your bidding across a few different sessions.

There are a few easy ways to get a sense of a good starting bid.

• You can go to Priceline’s Winning Bid Page to see recent successful bids, that were made on Priceline over the past month. Because any particular bids might have been for low-occupancy or high-occupancy dates, and you can’t tell from the website, this doesn’t necessarily give you a great idea of what you will pay for your stay. However, it can work to help you get a feel for the going rates. You might start your bidding at 70-80% of this value.
• You can go to Hotwire and see what they are charging for the least expensive mystery hotel in the same star rating and location that you are bidding on. You should be able to do better than this price, so again start at maybe 75% of this value, and expect to be able to get it at a price somewhere between that and the Hotwire price. Many of the same hotels make their rooms available through both these services.
• You can just look at the retail price that Priceline shows for your zone and rating, and start out with a percentage of that rate. If you think it is likely a slow-time of the year, start your bidding at 30-40% of the retail hotel value. If it is busy, start your bidding at 60% of the value. This is less precise, but also requires less effort than the other methods.
• You can go to Bidding for Travel or Better Bidding to see exactly what people are bidding and getting in specific zones and for specific dates. Of course, this is more time-consuming than the other approaches.

Getting even more bids (advanced)

Priceline makes it easy to add additional zones to your request, but you can’t easily remove zones that you previously bid on. So, the simplest way to take advantage of “free rebid zones”, is to add an additional zone, each time you want to re-submit your bid.

However, Priceline will consider any unique set of zones to be a different bid. So, you are actually entitled to a new bid for every possible combination of zones.

In our Maui example, instead of being able to bid four times, you can bid eight times. You can bid on Zone 1 (your target zone), Zone 1+3, Zone 1+4, Zone 1+5, Zone 1+3+4, Zone 1+3+5, Zone 1+4+5, and Zone 1+3+4+5. In the Chicago example, there were eight free rebid zones, so you could bid 256 different unique combinations of your initial target zone and these 8 other zones.

Unfortunately, this can be a bit complicated. You must iterate through all the combinations, and you will have to restart each bid from scratch, rather than simply adding a zone when Priceline asks you to.

Most of the time, it just isn’t worth the extra effort. But, we have occasionally resorted to this approach when there were only a few free rebid zones, we didn’t want to come back later to book, and there was a wide range of prices we wanted to try.

Get a Great Hotel Rate with Hotwire (and Other 'Opaque' Booking Tools)

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