I took AutoBid for a spin. And within roughly two minutes after selecting Buy Hotel Room, AutoBid ha

Savvy travelers budapest cheap hotels who use Priceline s Name Your Own Price service budapest cheap hotels to score great hotel deals know that the process can be time-consuming and unpredictable. What s more, it can require a lot of research and guesswork to make an astute bid.
With Priceline s Name Your Own Price service, you select your dates, areas of a city where you want to stay and preferred star ratings, and then place a bid for a hotel room without knowing the hotel name in advance. If Priceline rejects your price, you have to wait 24 hours to bid again unless you add locations, change the star level or alter your travel dates.
Until now, your best resources for gaining a bidding edge were checking hotel prices on the competitor discount site Hotwire.com, where rates can be somewhat higher but are disclosed upfront, or consulting a bevy of bidding-help websites.
These sites, including BiddingForTravel.com, BetterBidding.com and BidOnTravel.com, budapest cheap hotels collect winning and losing Priceline bids, often through message boards, and offer tips and strategies. But, acting on their sometimes-outdated information can be heavy-lifting.
budapest cheap hotels Given the multiplicity of hotel zones, star ratings, bid prices and their combinations (amounting to thousands of bid possibilities for big cities), The Bidding Traveler s algorithms can more speedily calculate and execute optimum bidding strategies budapest cheap hotels on Priceline than most travelers can. The Bidding Traveler aims to be a convenience tool and not exploitative or burdensome to Priceline.
You simply enter the desired city, dates, hotel zones and star ratings; view recently rejected and accepted Priceline bids; and enter a lowball bid and your final offer after reviewing bid-price recommendations. Then you can choose manual bidding or AutoBid.
budapest cheap hotels For AutoBid, which takes the pain out of bidding, you have to use Internet Explorer, and a browser plug-in transfers your bid information to Priceline, where you enter your credit card details. When you select Buy Hotel Room on Priceline, AutoBid starts the bidding with your lowest offer, including different zone combinations, and automatically raises your bid in increments until a bid is accepted or your highest offer is rejected.
I took AutoBid for a spin. And within budapest cheap hotels roughly two minutes after selecting Buy Hotel Room, AutoBid had enabled me to submit multiple bids on Priceline, which ultimately accepted a $59 bid for a weekend night stay in early April at a 3-and-a-1/2-star DoubleTree hotel in Fort Lee, N.J. The retail rate on the DoubleTree website was $109. (After Pricelines s taxes and fees, I saved nearly 40% on the Priceline deal.)
During budapest cheap hotels those two minutes, Priceline had rejected my $53 bid, and I watched as AutoBid automatically budapest cheap hotels and successfully steered my $59 bid through the system. The process was so quick that 18 minutes after Priceline sent me an e-mail confirmation of the $59 stay, it sent me another budapest cheap hotels e-mail urging me to try bidding again because an initial $53 bid using AutoBid had been rejected. (Even though I used AutoBid only once, it automatically submitted an unspecified number of bids. AutoBid submits bids so fast, in fact, that Priceline s e-mail system can t keep up.)
Pros: Makes bidding for hotels on Priceline more intelligent, faster, easier. Facilitates submission of your low bid and automatically increases the bid incrementally until a bid is accepted or your highest bid is rejected. Enters free rebids, enabling you to enter the highest number budapest cheap hotels of bids within Priceline s 24-hour rules. (If a $125 four-star bid downtown was rejected, AutoBid can immediately facilitate a $130 bid for a downtown hotel when you add uptown, too, because no four-star hotels are offered uptown.) Very transparent, showing total price for lowest and highest bids; displays recently accepted bids made by others with the hotel name.
Cons: Displays of recently accepted bids sometimes irrelevant since they may be more than four months old. Some zones don t show any recently accepted bids. No FAQs. Live Help is often offline, although site provides quick answers via e-mail to inquiries. AutoBid available only for Internet Explorer.
Takeaway: Awesome service, although no guarantee your hotel bid will be accepted. New beta version rolling out this week with side by side displays of hotels star ratings, retail rates and average winning budapest cheap hotels bids.
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