For those that don't know, Priceline offers both bidding and Express deals. I've done the bidding before, and it is capable of being "exploited" to get a better rate and know which hotel you're bidding on, but honestly it's a lot of effort, and theres websites dedicated to it if you want to read up. Not to mention that you might only save like 15% (which can be good, but still, you could spend hours doing it). Priceline Express deals give you a price and give you some general info about the hotel, but don't tell you the individual hotel you're booking until you've agreed to book. Priceline Express deals can save you like 25-40%, which is huge if you're on a budget. This will help you know which hotel each of the Express deals is referring to.
For example, i just booked a hotel for tomorrow when ill be road tripping a bit. The hotel is listed on Priceline (Ramada) as $59. I got it for $40. (i'm going to ignore taxes/fees for the sake of discussion. you can typically just plan on those being $10-20, depending on the price of the room.) I'd say it's a pretty sizable discount. worth spending a few minutes, especially if you're looking at nicer hotels that go for $100+.
When they list an express deal, they actually give you a lot of information. They give you the Stars, the miniumum guest rating, the general Guest Review number, the Percentage saved,, the specific area, and the amenities. These are ALL helpful. The basic gist of it is: pull up the list of all hotels and from there you can sort, based on what the Express deal tells you. I will refer to the "general" list and the "express deal" list. The general one is just the large list telling you specific hotels and rates and what pops up when you plug in the city and date.
1) Amenities - Each thing that is listed as an amenity can be plugged into the general list to sort it and narrow down the choices. If you see something like "Restaurant" listed, it makes it easy. Not a lot of hotels have Restaurants in them (at least <$100 ones), and it should be very obvious which hotel it is.
2) Percentage saved - for my room, the express deal said $40, and "save 32%". This isnt just a number they throw out there, it's actually 32% less than what it's listed for in the general priceline area. So for example, just multiply the express price by the percentage, and you'll get the general rate. For mine $40 (express rate) x 32% = $59. If you look on the general list, there will only be one or two that are listed for that specific price. Of course, they just round to the nearest dollar so keep that in mind.
3) Area - there are different "Areas" that priceline breaks it down into. For example, Columbus hotels are not simply Columbus. They break it down into regions like Downtown Columbus, Polaris, Crosswoods, etc. The express deal will give you "Downtown Columbus" and you can guarantee that on the general list, only those under "Downtown Columbus" will be options.
4) Guest rating - again, there is some rounding, but if the Express deal tells you that it has a 6+ rating, you can bet than it's going to be SPECIFICALLY from 6.0-6.9 and not outside that range. If it tells you that the express deal is a "6+" guest rating, and the only options left are a 6.9 and a 7.0, it's probably going to be the 6.9 one.
5) Guest review number - rounding again. They might give you a general number like 30, 100, or 700 guest reviews, and you can count on the fact that 700 might mean 765, rather than 120. And 30 might mean 31. This is more general than the other info, but still can help.
This isn't crazy complicated, and probably some people figured this out just by looking at the website, but hopefully this can help people or draw attention to some good deals on hotels.
October 10, 2017 at 04:58AM
