by Dave Stanford

Created on: July 25, 2010   Last Updated: November 05, 2010

Priceline.com makes it possible for you to not only save money on items such as flights, hotels, and car rentals, but it also allows you to have a bit of luxury along the way. Although you can get deals on flights and car rentals, the best deal on this website has to be the option to "Name Your Own Price" for hotels. Many other travel websites allow you to search for deals, but none allow you to put in a bid auction style on the area and class of hotel you want. There are a few guidelines to successfully getting the hotel class you want and a price that saves you money.

The first thing you want to do is search for the hotels available in the city or area using the "Hotel search" option on the site. This will search for hotels in the area where you want to stay and give you a list of available hotels and prices so that you can see the normal listed price and star classes of hotels in this area. This option is like any other travel website where you see the hotel name and a set price.

Then if you want to save some more money you'll want to choose the option "Name your own price". You can save the most money using this option, but if you follow a few simple steps will not only save, but get a 4 star hotel at a 2 star hotel price. This option is different than a standard search as you select a hotel class, such as 4 star, the hotel zone of the city you want to stay in, and the price you wish to bid, but you won't know the hotel name until your bid is accepted. All you will know the hotel star class and area zone prior to the bid getting accepted.

The most important thing you need to know prior to bidding is which specific hotels are in each zone and the star class of each hotel. By using an information website such as biddingfortravel.com you can get a list of hotels in each city and the star class for each hotel. However, these lists may change from time to time, so it is important to keep this in mind before bidding and adding zones to your options.

This website will show you a list of hotels that looks like:

City 1

Zone a:

4 Star Hotels

Blue Hotel

Red Hotel

3 Star Hotels:

Green Four

Yellow Hotel

Zone b:

2 Star Hotels

Purple Hotel

In the above example notice there are two zones listed and in each zone it lists of all hotel star levels with the hotel name (the names above are examples). In Zone 2 above we only see a 2 star hotel listed, which means there is no other class of hotel available in that zone. This is the information you can use with your bids in Priceline.

When you

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>