« Priceline for the Timid: An excruciatingly detailed primer. | Main | Priceline for the Timid III: More pre-bid research »
March 31, 2005
Priceline for the Timid: Part II - Pre Bidding Research
PRE-BID RESEARCH
Check for Winning Bids
- First go to these two websites – Better Bidding and Bidding for Travel. I prefer Better Bidding as I find it more helpful, user-friendly and open to other strategies besides Priceline if it is not the best choice. However, you may prefer Bidding for Travel and it has a great deal of useful data, so visit both.
- Look up the zone you are bidding on and look at the winning bids reported as well as the hotels reported in the zone. Other winning bids are a good guideline but not the only one.
- If you see a bid where the dates exactly match yours, that gives you a lot of information. Check to see if the poster left his or her bidding history. If the bid was accepted on the first try, based on other winning amounts you might try to undercut it. If the bid is not recent, the inventory may already have sold out.
- I didn’t see exactly my dates on either Better Bidding or Bidding for Travel. There seems to be a range for 4* hotels in Philadelphia from as low as $43 a night (for the Hyatt Regency Penns Landing) on up. 3* hotels are reported in a similar range; low forties and up. Fewer reported bids for 2.5*; this could be because there are fewer “free rebids” – I’ll explain that later.
- In DC, (Better Bidding, Bidding for Travel) there are fewer reported wins in the Kennedy Center area, and more common bidding in the Capitol Hill and Downtown/White House areas as well as the close suburbs, which I do not want. It gives me a range; 4* seems to go from $75 lowball to $110 and up per night in the city. There’s much less data for 2.5* and 3* bidding.
- Birmingham is just a plain old mystery. There’s almost no data. I went to a British site as well, Clever Bidding, that is similar to Bidding for Travel to see if they had any further information, but there wasn't much at all. Bidding for Travel has a few bids, as does Better Bidding, but they’re almost all more than a year old. At least it gave me a possible range ($65 for 3*, $70-$85 for 4*).
Check for Availability and Rates
- Check the lists of hotels reported at both Better Bidding and Bidding for travel at the hotel’s own website (not a travel agency); especially the ones that seem most frequent, and find out costs during your nights. Particularly note if there is a rate change.
- The Hyatt Regency is by far the most likely 4* hotel on Priceline for downtown Philadelphia and it is. . . sold out for my dates according to its website. The Hilton Garden Inn, the common 3* is selling at $189/night, well above its usual rate. This is going to be harder than we thought. What I know from this is that lowballing here at $41 or $43 probably won’t work but I have enough time to try it anyway if I have the patience.
- In Washington, the Melrose, one of the 4* in the Georgetown area, is offering rooms for $109 a night or just under $125 a night with tax. The Park Hyatt is $260, the Westin Grand $340! A 3*, the Marriott Washington Westend, is $189 per night. I can certainly use the Melrose as a cancelable backup (I'll talk about that soon).
- In Birmingham, rates are higher on Thursday and drop on Friday and Saturday nights. The 4* Crowne Plaza is £95 on Thursday, £69 on Friday and Sayurday. The Marriott (4*) is £129 and £80, The Hyatt (4*) £119 and £80. The 3* Holiday Inn is £85 and £50, the 3* Jurys Inn is the only hotel with a steady rate, £63 per night.
This gives us plenty of information, but there's still a bit more useful research to do - and we'll do it in the next post!
Posted by Leigh Witchel at March 31, 2005 6:42 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.leighwitchel.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/63Comments
Post a comment