I love Priceline… I basically use it every time I need a hotel room and I don’t need to stay in a specific hotel (i.e. wedding party, convention, bed and breakfast). The goal with Priceline is to work the system so that you get the best hotel at the cheapest price in the particular “region” you want to stay.

The main websites that you use to achieve this include the following:
1. Priceline.com (duh)
2. Hotwire.com
3. Betterbidding.com

Other helpful sites/tools:
1. Kayak.com
2. TripAdvisor.com (to get an idea of how the hotels rank and determine the best area of a city you should stay)
3. Priceline iPhone App (I’ll explain how that one helps further down)

I think the best way to show how this all works is to plan a fake trip. Let’s say we want to go see the Twins play in their new stadium, Target Field, in Minneapolis, MN.

You should start off by heading over to TripAdvisor to learn more about the city, figure out where it is the best to stay (downtown/east side/garden district/etc), what there is to do there (“Things to do” TripAdvisor rankings are great) and see if it’s a city in which a rental car, cab, walking/public transit will be best when considering where to stay. From all of that information you can get an idea of the city’s region in which you want to stay. Priceline breaks down each city in to geographical regions so that you know your hotel won’t be located at the Airport if you are trying to stay in the downtown area and vice versa.

So then head on over to Priceline and begin a search…

In our example, staying one Saturday night in Minneapolis, MN should do it –that place has a mall and a baseball team and a river, whoopee fucking doo.
The next screen that Priceline will show you lays out the areas in which you can select to stay. ALWAYS start of picky, select only the #1 area you want to stay in and nothing else.

Let’s say we select “Downtown Minneapolis” as our desired area. Priceline will then bring up the star rankings for that area. Keep in mind some areas don’t have all the star levels available because hotels of certain caliber simply don’t exist in that region (which is actually helpful as you’ll see later on).

Always select 4-Star Deluxe (or highest star level available). After all you not only want to stay somewhere on the cheap but also get a sick ass deal for it. Anyone can stay at the La Quinta Inn next to an abandoned Best Products parking lot with a year round gypsy carnival – that is not the goal here.

If you are concerned about just which hotels are in that area and star level here is where the most useful website in the process, BetterBidding.com, comes in to play. Go to http://www.betterbidding.com/ and select the state you are staying in (in this case Minnesota) then select the Priceline forum for that state (Priceline-Minnesota). At the top there will always be a “pinned” forum topic with something named along the lines of “Pinned: Priceline Hotel List – Minnesota”. This is an ever-changing and constantly fact-checked listing of all hotels that participate with Priceline and their regions and star levels.

So for instance we go looking for Downtown Minneapolis on that list and find:

All those 4 star hotels sound good to me… and I can always shoot over to TripAdvisor.com if I am worried that some of them may not be up to snuff and then I may also consider possibly changing my region. I have yet to find a horrible 4 star hotel on these lists however.

Here is where shit gets interesting – your bid for your hotel. There are several places you can look for ideas on a good starting bid. The BetterBidding site you just used also keeps a user-driven listing of winning bids under each state’s forum and you can check that:

These forum posts give you an idea of a specific date, location in the city, star level and what bid was required to land that hotel (Note that the dollar amounts listed are pretax bid prices). This shouldn’t be your only stop however because chances are these postings will not perfectly mirror your desired criteria.

You can continue your search by going to Kayak.com and searching to see what hotels would be going for at published retail prices for the dates and star level you are attempting to bid on. It can also show you if there is a wide range between prices of hotels with your desired star level (which tends to mean better deals for you).
Next I recommend going to Hotwire.com, a blind-buy hotel website that can help show you what a reasonable bid could be. Search the exact same criteria (note that you only filter by region after searching) and see what comes up:

So now we see that pretax $67 bucks lands you a 4 star hotel in your particular region using Hotwire. Note that the Hotwire star rankings and regions and the Priceline star rankings and regions are NOT the same. The BetterBidding.com site can show you the Hotwire hotels are in much the same fashion as the Priceline hotels list, simply click the “Hotwire-Insert State Name” discussion instead of Priceline. The rankings are pretty similar though, you won’t find a terrible hotel in the high star rankings.

So $67 bucks is now your new MAX bid consideration. Immediately take 20% off that bid price, so approximately $54.

The last step before you make an initial bid is to pull out your iPhone and boot up the “Priceline Negotiator” App (it’s free). Select the city and star level you want, then select the star level of the hotel in the region you want. Slide the “Name Your Own Price” bid slide bar all the way to the left of the “Low Chance” left side. That bid comes out to $42.

You can start your bidding off at $42 now and have an okay chance of landing the hotel, I tend to bump it up a couple bucks if the 20% discount off of Hotwire is more (recall it was $12 dollars more) so I would go with a first bid of $48 bucks.

Fill in your bid and name (I recommend you create a profile and sign in to the Priceline if you want to save time by avoiding the need to fill out the credit card and address information every time).

Don’t be scared if you get a message like this “Based on past Priceline customer requests for hotels in this area, your offer price of $48 has almost no chance of being accepted.” – this hasn’t proven the case more than a few times for me.

The next page will show you the total price (including Taxes and Services Fees) — which may be some dollars added on to your bid, but you are still shattering the lowest published price so who cares.

I never mess with Insurance. Then initial the page and wait to see if your bid is accepted. If it is, that’s great and you are done. Print out the confirmation page and Google the hotel you landed and see how sick of a deal it was by comparing your price to the published rate.

If it didn’t go through, no worries, now you just adjust your bid price… but this is where it also requires some trickery. See, they want you to not only change your bid but ALSO change one of your criteria (such as star level or region).

For this you should open up a new browser window and again bring up Priceline.com and again search for your city and date. But now you are looking for help from the section where you select your specific region for your stay.

Click each location one by one and see which star levels are illuminated below as available hotels. You are looking for regions that DO NOT have the same star levels as what you are seeing. For instance “Roseville” shows that there are no 3.5 or 4 star hotels in that region.

You can now return to the “Try Again Right Now” browser window and add “Roseville” to your Downtown selection and then DO NOT change the star level from 4 stars. The beauty in this is that because there are no 4 star hotels in Roseville you are essentially searching the same pool of 4 star downtown hotels you initially searched. Add 4-5 dollars to your asking bid and try again.

If you again get a rejection on your bid, repeat the last step to find more regions that do not that have your requested star level. NEVER BID MORE THAN THE HOTWIRE OFFER – If Hotwire had a hotel in your region for a set price, no need to use Priceline, simply buy with Hotwire. This has never happened to me though, Priceline has always scored a better price (usually around 20% less than the Hotwire price).

Do these steps and you will always land a great deal on your hotel with Priceline.