Tag: hotel

Priceline: How to make it work for you

Priceline has forever changed the way I book hotels when I am traveling within the United States.  I now see pricing and booking hotels as a process of negotiation, and the better I am at it, the more I save, and the more I can travel.  Over the years, I have acquired a few techniques for maximizing Priceline’s potential to save me money.  Here I’d like to share a few with you.

1.  Don’t settle for face value – always “Name your own price!”

It may seem a bit risky to bid on a hotel room instead of choosing your hotel directly through Priceline’s hotel listings.  But believe me, whatever risk is involved (very little, in my opinion) is minimal compared to your potential savings (up to 75%!). It is true – when you bid, you don’t know what hotel you are booking with until your bid is accepted.  But Priceline allows you to specify how many stars you prefer, and this makes it highly likely that your hotel preferences will be met.

In my experience, the hotels I have stayed in through Priceline bookings are on par or sometimes even better quality than I would have managed to find on my own, and I most likely would have spent much more.
The biggest drawback to the bidding process is a loss of control regarding where your hotel is located.  In general, the bigger the city, the more likely that Priceline will give you the flexibility of narrowing the neighborhood where you prefer your hotel will be located significantly enough to ensure your satisfaction with the location.

Please remember that if you have a car and are trying to stay in the city center of a large city, there are usually large parking fees for the hotel garages.

2.  Time is your friend.
Sometimes the bidding process is not ideal if you know exactly what you want from your hotel and what you want to spend on it.  If your bid is very specific, there are potentially only a small number of hotels that can meet your bid, and you have no way of knowing what their bottom line is.  Priceline controls your bidding process by forcing you to broaden your search by decreasing your star level or increasing the areas you are willing to stay every time you lose a bid.

But, you can continue to bid without changing anything about your original bid once every 24 hours.  So, if you plan ahead, you can begin your bidding process several weeks ahead of time in order to ensure you get the lowest price possible.  What I have done in the past is begin my bidding very low ($40), and then re-bidding with the same parameters and increasing my offer by $5 when I am permitted to every twenty-four hours
Keep in mind, this process is absolutely not necessary if you are flexible about your star levels and location, because as long as you change your bid parameters each time you bid, Priceline allows you to continue to bid as many times as you like.

3. Do some research first – your potential hotel is not as much of a mystery as you may think.
If you spend just a few minutes looking at the hotels listed at face value on Priceline’s site for the city and dates you need, you are actually looking at the inventory Priceline is pulling from to meet your bid for the “Name your own price” side of their site.  If you like what you see, you can be confident that you will be happy with whatever hotel accepts your bid.

Most importantly, this research allows you to familiarize yourself with the pricing of hotels for your city and time-frame so you have a better idea of where to start your bid.  If the lowest listed price for a hotel within your preferred star category is $150, then you can be pretty sure that your starting bid has to be a decent offer, and if you are bidding last-minute, you will need to bid higher.  On the other hand, if the price range of hotels you like on the site spans as low as $75 for example, you know your starting bid can be much lower.

4. Get an app!

With the help of my iPhone Priceline app I have booked hotels while standing in a theatre lobby in mid-town Manhattan, while in the passenger seat driving through South Carolina, standing in line at the airport, etc.  Many times I have used the app and literally checked into my hotel as little as a half hour later.  The app makes the process simple and quick.  It doesn’t have all of the information available through the website, but it will redirect you to your phone or iPad’s browser if necessary.

5.  If you are indecisive, Priceline is either your best friend or your worst enemy.
If you have trouble deciding on hotels and often find yourself spending hours of time researching every hotel option in the city you are traveling to, Priceline is a godsend because it does the research for you, in that the hotels it works with are comfortable and usually rank highly in customer reviews.  You can finally let go and save yourself all the research time and spend that time researching other critical things, like transportation options to and from the airport (if you are flying).

On the other hand, once you book a hotel through Priceline, you are charged immediately for that hotel.  If you happen to need to change your dates for any reason, this can be difficult to impossible to pull off.  So beware.  In this case, Priceline might end up costing you money instead of helping you.

Please note: I am in no way making money from advertising or sponsorship related to my travel tips.  I write these tips solely from personal opinion.  Also, these tips are related to booking hotels through Priceline, as I do not use Priceline for airline bookings.

My secret recipe for booking a good hotel room, every time.

My secret to hotel booking.
Booking comfortable, affordable and centrally located lodging is possibly the biggest and most underestimated challenge related to travel planning.  While there are many ways of going about meeting this challenge, over the years I have perfected my own system that I am now happily sharing with you.  In the following step-by-step instructions I hope to save you not only time but also money on your next vacation.

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So, let’s imagine that you are booking your dream trip to Venice, Italy.  A popular and sometimes quite expensive travel destination, it can be very difficult to know where to begin in your search through hundreds of hotel options, many seemingly quite expensive.
Instead of even attempting to evaluate the scope of accommodation options available to me in Venice, I instead save myself perhaps hours of time by going to a trusted travel expert – Frommers.com.
Frommers.com provides reviews on many things, but their hotel reviews are invaluable as they are reliable, clear, and most importantly, they are written by travel professionals.  This is an important point, and is the major reason their reviews are so trustworthy.
1.  Find a trusted and professional reviewer’s hotel listings for the city you would like to visit.
For our trip to Venice, I went to Google.com and type “frommers, venice” in the search bar, because my favorite professional travel review resource is Frommer’s.  Fodor’s also works, as does Lonely Planet, etc.  Use whatever source you are comfortable/familiar with – the important thing is that they are professional reviews, and not just reviews from the general public that have stayed at the hotel.
When I type Frommer’s Venice into google, the page I was looking for was the first result, which I clicked on to arrive at the homepage for Frommer’s information about Venice.  I then clicked on the left-hand side of the screen where it says “Venice Hotels” and “List All.”
Below is a screenshot of what you will be seeing when you are looking at the Frommer’s hotel listings for Venice.  You can sort the list by stars, price, name, and neighborhood.  I normally sort by price and then choose the hotel with the most stars.  For the sake of this blog post, let’s pretend we will select Hotel Al Piave, as it has a three star Frommer’s recommendation and is in a lower price range, listed as only one dollar sign.
An important note: Frommer’s star system is not related to the normal hotel star system.  Instead, their star system refers to their recommendations for hotels and is not related to the amount of amenities the hotel offers.  A Frommer’s 3-star hotel is their most recommended hotel, while a Frommer’s listing without stars is still recommended but not as highly recommended as their other listings.

2.  Read the hotel reviews to find the one that suits your needs. 
Next, I clicked on the name of the hotel, Hotel Al Piave, in order to read Frommer’s review, and to make sure that it sounded like the type of hotel that I would enjoy staying at.  Normally if the hotel has any major inconveniences related to location, architecture, amenities, etc, Frommer’s will mention it in the review.

3. Do a general search for hotels at your destination and in your date range on Kayak.com.
Kayak.com is like a giant search engine for travel, allowing you to gain a perspective on the general price range of the type of travel you are booking in that area and timeframe.  Kayak is able to do this by searching prices listed from a huge number of discount travel websites like Expedia, and Hotels.com to help you find the best price available on the internet.  I also like Kayak because it includes even more information than pricing, like Tripadvisor reviews, and an interactive map with all the hotels in the area you are searching for to help you get a great idea of location.
Below, I have typed “Venice, Italy” and my dates under the hotel search section in Kayak.

4.  Price the hotel(s) you are most interested in and check availability on Kayak.com.
Once Kayak has performed a search for available hotels in Venice for my date range, I then narrow the results by searching specifically for the hotel or hotels I found in the Frommer’s reviews that I am most interested in.  In this case, we liked the Hotel Al Piave.  Kayak offers many options for narrowing your search on the left-hand side of the screen within the search results.  Toward the bottom of these options, you will find a search box that says “Hotel Name.”  Here I type “Piave.”  Kayak found two hotels with “Piave” in the name, but only one is in Venice.  I click on the hotel in Venice to confirm this is the hotel that I am searching for.

5.  Confirm the hotel information matches the information from the Frommer’s review, and check out current prices and more reviews at Kayak.com.
I arrived at Kayak’s detail page for the Al Piave Hotel, which you can see below.  Because the name is slightly different on the Kayak listing than the Frommer’s listing, I confirm this hotel is the same by comparing the contact information listed for the hotel here with the contact information listed with Frommer’s.
The information matches, so I know I have successfully found the hotel that Frommer’s was recommending.  Here on the Kayak detail page I can get tons of information, including more hotel reviews from other travel sites, as well as the pricing for the hotel on about 15 major travel discount websites, and  more information about the hotel’s location.

6.  Check pricing on the hotel’s website.
Before I book my hotel, I need to perform one more important step. Now that I have researched current pricing for the hotel, I need to compare this pricing with the pricing on the actual website of the hotel itself.
As surprising as this may sound, most of the time I book my lodging directly through the hotel itself, because most of the time the hotel offers pricing that is competitive with what the online discount sites are offering.
As you can see below, the Hotel Al Piave is no exception, with a room available that is even less expensive than on the discount sites.
Let’s say for the sake of this discussion that instead of being cheaper, the prices listed on the Hotel Al Piave’s website were more expensive than the prices listed on the discount travel websites.  Before I book with another website, I would give the hotel a chance to match the other website’s price by calling them and telling them about the rate I found, and if they could sell the room to me directly at that rate.  Most often they can, as they would much rather book directly with you than have to offer service fees to outside agencies selling their rooms.

7.  Book your room!
After completing all my necessary research on my stay in Venice in about twenty minutes, I am ready to book my room directly with the Hotel Al Piave.  Booking directly with the hotel has many advantages as opposed to booking with a discount site “middle-man,” including more control over your reservation, as well as – in many cases – a more understanding cancellation policy, etc.
Do remember to always book with your credit card when possible, as your credit card company serves an important role as your advocate if something goes wrong with your room or with the billing.
And most importantly, enjoy your trip!!!
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Another important note: It is important that you know this system is relevant for both North American and European travel, so once you learn it, it will serve you well on a large variety of vacations.  Kayak.com and Frommers.com are the two websites I use, and while both of these companies are American, I’ve found that being an American, my standards for lodging are high and I am not as willing to compromise my expectations for lodging as much as I am willing to adjust my expectations for food, transportation, and sight-seeing.  Therefore, the information and recommendations by these companies on both American and non-American lodging is quite relevant, as their frame of reference matches mine.