I love Priceline because it saves me money time and time again. In the good old days, you always have to accept the prices that hotels, airlines and car rental companies give you. With Priceline’s Name Your Own Price program, you can instead enter the price that you would like to offer and then have companies bid for your business instead.
A Little History of Name Your Own Price
These name your own price type programs aren’t new, as you can pretty much find them for any type of reservations nowadays. However, I believe Priceline is the only company offering it currently.
How Name Your Own Price Works
- Go to Priceline’s front page.
- In the section where it says Name Your Own Price, put in your requirements (for example, type in city where you are staying and the dates if you are looking for hotels).
- Click bid now to go to a page to fill out some more details like the price you are willing to pay.
- Once you click next, it will ask you for your credit card so it can automatically accept the offers if it matches your requirements.
- Once accepted, you will be sent a confirmation!
Thoughts on Priceline’s Name Your Own Price Program
I’ve saved so much money using this program. In order to discourage you to start very low and inch your bids upwards until you get offers, the system disallows you to use the same requirements with same credit card within a 24 hour window. A trick I use is to use my wife’s card after I use mine to double my chances of getting a good bid.
The other trick is to know where to start bidding. Priceline has a Winning Bids in Top Cities page, where they list out what type of bids other people are getting on hotels. Knowing this information is great because it gives you a good price to start bidding, so you don’t spend too much time trying to find that rock bottom price.
Also, make sure you start early because you can get more bids in. It’s a little work, but you can seriously save lots of money this way once you get used to the system.
- Priceline – Official Site
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Get idea of using Priceline’s winning bid system for their name your own price program. Now why didn’t I think of that??
Priceline is a pretty good website to get good hotel deals. The name your own price program is good for those who aren’t fixated on a particular hotel brand since you cannot specifically book a particular hotel.
I agree though that using the recent bids is a good starting point but always start low and start early because they don’t allow you to keep bid and inch your cent one by one.