by Jennifer Eblin

Created on: June 12, 2009

Priceline is a website that focuses on offering travel reservations for customers, usually at discounted prices. They run television commercials constantly with William Shatner taking on the role of the Priceline Negotiator, where he encourages customers to set their own prices for the things they need for their trip. They offer discounts on hotels, flights, rental cars and combinations of all three. While the website has a lot of different features, one works better than the rest to help customers save money, Name Your Own Price.

The Name Your Own Price feature is what they advertise frequently on television. The way it works is that they actually let customers select the price they want to pay for a hotel room. On television they keep running one commercial that claims customers can get a multiple star hotel on the Las Vegas strip for $99 a night. Before heading over to Priceline though, you need to know what to do.

The first step is to pick the location where you plan to stay and then the location. Let's say you're heading to Atlanta, Georgia for three days, then you'll want to add that information into the system. It automatically searches through the hotel rooms listed to find your possible matches. Just like any other travel website though, prices vary depending on the day. Weekends are always more expensive than weekdays and holiday nights are also more expensive.

You then have the option of picking one of these hotel rooms or doing the Name Your Own Price feature, which reduces the price even more. When you choose this option, you're sent to another page. Here you need to enter your credit or debit card information and your name. You also setup the price you want to pay for the room and select the number of stars you want, for example a two-star hotel for $69 a night.

Priceline tries to be helpful by telling you the median price for a hotel room based on your star level, but this is really just a ploy. If you note the price on the previous page, you can actually base your price on that rather than the price they list. They might list the price at $89 when the real price is $69, which means you can bid on a room for $40 or less.

The best way of using Priceline and getting a lower price is to use the Name Your Own Price feature and be smart about it. If they turn down your first offer, you can bid again as long as you raise your price by at least $10, or you can bid again using a different email address or credit card number. Either way you'll still get a cheap hotel room by using Priceline in the right way.

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