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  Hotel Strategies

The first step for "Naming Your Own Price" using Priceline is to determine which hotels you might get.

You want to make sure that you don’t wind up with a “stinker”. Bidding on 4-star hotel is no guarantee that you are going to get a place that you’ll like. Bidding on lower star-rated hotels is an even bigger risk. You want to make sure you are bidding appropriately, for the worst possible hotel that you might get, for any given zone and star rating

• Remember that if you are bidding for a specific star rating, you are actually bidding for all the hotels, at that star rating or above. You might bid for a 3-star hotel, and get one of the 4-star options. At first blush, this sounds great. But the 4-star hotel might not be very nice. Make sure to evaluate all the hotels at higher-star ratings as well as the rating you are bidding on.
• Several websites are designed to help you determine the different possible "Name Your Own Price" hotels, for each zone and star rating combination. Each of these websites depends on reports from individual users on what hotels they wound up getting on Priceline. This information is then aggregated into lists of all the hotels that anyone has ever reported.

By scanning these lists, you can get a good idea of the hotels you might wind up getting However, there is always a risk that you wind up getting a hotel that no one has reported yet. And some of the hotels on the list may no longer be participating with the program.

Do us all a favor and report your winning bid information back to the website(s), so that everyone else can benefit from having more information, when it is their time to book.

Bidding Traveler

The Bidding Traveler is the most sophisticated of these websites, letting you select zones and star ratings in a manner similar to Priceline itself, and aggregating winning bid amounts and the date of the last reported occurrence into the list of the hotels. It will even offer to automatically bid for your hotel.

Don’t rely on its final offer suggestion. The maximum amount of money that you should offer should not be based on what amounts have been accepted in the past, but rather on the going rates for rooms at the time of your reservation, and the discount that you require to give up control over your reservation. You can, however, put in your own maximum rate (based on the worst hotel you might get), and use the tool for automatic bidding.

Hotel Deals Revealed

The nicest list is available on Hotel Deals Revealed. It provides inline TripAdvisor ratings and commentary. However, it is likely to be missing a larger quantity of hotels, because it is currently getting a lower-volume of reports than some other sites.

Bidding for Travel

Bidding For Travel has been around the longest, and tends to have the most comprehensive listings. The downside is that you’ll have to manually look up each hotel to learn more about it, and whether you want to stay there or not Some hotels have {reviews], but these just link to a low volume of end-user reviews that happened to have been posted to this service.

Better Bidding

Better Bidding seems to be getting a bit more recent reports than the other sites. It is more likely to include a recently added hotel, but might be missing some of the hotels that are listed on Bidding for Travel.

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

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