Priceline London: How to get free re-bids

Priceline remember limits you to one bid per day. But with these advanced priceline bidding tips, you can massively increase that – to as much as six bids per day for one five star area. This will give you extra chances to pay the minimum possible price for your room.

It might be worth reading this guide twice: it takes a while to grasp how it works.

Note: this guide assumes you've read the simple Priceline guide. If all this seems too complicated I've got many more ways to save money on London accommodation that you should check out instead, or as well.

You can get free extra bids from Priceline. The central premise of this technique is adding extra areas to your request where, because there are no hotels of the standard you require, you can't possibly end up in.

Let's use the following scenario as an example:

You want to stay in a five star hotel in London. The area you really want to stay in is one of the classiest in London: Mayfair-Soho. We're going to plot a strategy that will give you extra bids; this though requires a couple of minutes of preliminary research.

(The easiest way to understand this example is to have the site open in front of you…)

Step 1: Run a check to find your 'fake' areas

This is an important if boring stage – if you skip this check you may end up winning an area you don’t want to stay in, and you can’t cancel once you’ve won.

Once you've navigated to the Name Your Own Price section on the Priceline site put in your vacation details (the place and dates of your stay, and how many rooms you'll need) .

Stay on this screen a while: it's time to work out which areas ONLY have five star hotels. The reason we're doing this is to maximise the number of bids you get.As you’ll see, priceline divides London into ten areas. Each one has a checkbox by it.

Decheck all the boxes.
One at a time, check and decheck them. As you do so, look at the part of the page where it says ‘step two: choose the star level for your hotel’.
Write down the areas where the ‘five star’ level is grayed out. This means there are no five star hotels in that area. As of Spring 2009 they were:

Bloomsbury – Marble Arch
Finsbury and Islington
Hammersmith
Notting Hill-Bayswater
The City and London Bridge

Failing to see if the list is updated may result in you staying in a part of town you don't want to!

Keep the list handy – you’ll need it in a second.

Step 2: Onto the bidding stage

Remember, a sensible price level to bid at is Hotwire's price minus 15 percent.

Wait before you bid though, as that is the price that Priceline is likely to accept. We're going to use some of our free extra bids to ensure you can't get it even cheaper! Drop it to the very bottom of what you think realistically may be accepted. (there’s no point going down to e.g. $1 – hotels are rarely likely to accept at these prices, particularly not at the high end of the market). Perhaps 40 percent off the hotwire price may be a good cheeky 'first try.'

Now: bid.

If you’ve won, great! But if you've bid 40 percent off, then the chances are you’ve been rejected. Here’s where the clever bit happens.

Ok remember:

Priceline will never put you in a hotel less than your chosen star level. It will sometimes put you above it though. So think of the star levels as 'at least three/four/five star' - so the three star box on Priceline actually searches the four and five star avaliability as well. (but not the two star or the one star avaliability - these are excluded because you want 'at least' three star.)
Not all areas have all star levels. But you're allowed to pick them even if they don't have the star level you want in them.
You are allowed free rebids ONLY IF you change your area and/or star level.

So the plan is to add areas to your search where, because there aren’t five star hotels, you have no chance of winning. Adding an area, even one without the star level of hotel you want, means you qualify for another bid. As there are no five star hotels in the new area, the only area you could possibly stay in would be your original choice! You’ve just been finding these areas which will access you extra bids but without there being any chance of you staying there.

Back to the example - remember, in this scenario you want to stay 5* in Mayfair-Soho:

1. Check the box for Mayfair-Soho, which is where you actually want to stay.

2. Check the box for five star hotels.

3. Then check the box for any ONE of the areas which don’t have any five star hotels.

This means you’re still only bidding on the Mayfair-Soho area.

4. Add to your bid that got rejected. Maybe choose 35 percent off the Hotwire price.

If you’re rejected again, all’s not lost. You can get more free rebids by carefully repeating the process.

So this time you’ll have to search in Mayfair-Soho, the non five star area you’ve just chosen, and ONE other non-five star area too. But again, because you’re ONLY willing to stay in five star hotels, this essentially just searches Mayfair-Soho. You need to add the ‘pretend’ areas one at a time so you don’t blow all your chances in one go.

In London therefore you have SIX chances a day at bidding for five star hotels in Mayfair-Soho, instead of just one! With clever incremental raising of your bids you can therefore get the very lowest price around!

What if I still haven't been accepted after six bids?

Let’s say that after you’ve used your six free bids, you still haven’t found a five star hotel in the area that you like. You still have options:

Add in extra five star areas, if you don’t mind staying there. Again, do this one at a time to maximise your number of bids. You will only have a few more to choose from.