Getting the Cheapest Deals on Priceline.com

I’m all for saving money. How about you?

That’s why I squealed like a schoolgirl in front of Justin Timberlake (ew, I can’t believe I just typed his name; I have to wash my keyboard now) when I heard about BiddingForTravel.com.

BiddingForTravel.com is a forum where members list the their winning Priceline.com bids for airlines, hotels, and rental cars. Friends tell me it’s best for hotels though. This means you can find out about how much you should bid for a particular hotel (or class of hotels) and be reasonably sure you’ll get it.

And guess how much this information costs? My favorite price: free!

Without this information, you might pay more on Priceline.com than is really necessary. If you try to bid on a hotel right now, a suggested price range for each class of hotels will be given to you. However, these ranges are generally higher than a what those hotels will really accept. And even after making your bid, Priceline.com will warn you to increase your bid to better your chances.

Why, Shatner, why? Aren’t you here to help us save money?

Of course, you could just as easily enter in too low a bid. All of us would love to pay $10/night for a midtown hotel in Manhattan, but it ain’t gonna happen. So that’s where BiddingForTravel.com comes in.

Here’s how it works. Say you’re going on a trip to NYC and want to stay somewhere near Times Square. You can:

• Browse the forum

  For instance, you can look under the NYC hotels section and go through its hotel list, which includes reviews and previous winning bids.

• Search the forum

  The search box is sort of buried in the middle and uses Google’s search engine. Pretty simple to use once you spot it.

• Ask for “Bidding assistance”

  This is where you post a message asking for help in getting a particular bid. Before you do that though, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with their posting guidelines.

Even though the site looks like a rainbow got drunk and threw up on it, it’ll save you both time (from entering in a bid too low) and money (from entering in a bid too high). That makes Priceline.com and BiddingForTravel.com a pretty damn awesome tool for thrifty travelers.

UPDATE 2/21/2008: A buddy just told me about a similar site called BetterBidding.

Author: Mike Lee

An idealistic realist, humanistic technologist & constant student. View all posts by Mike Lee