Are you planning a trip to San Diego and you would like to stay at a nice hotel, but you don’t want to break the bank. The good news is that Priceline® can save you serious money on a hotel and San Diego offers an amazing number of free rebid areas when you are trying to win a 4-Star Deluxe hotel. Currently, out of the 15 bidding areas offered, only 3 of the areas offer 4-Star Deluxe hotels. The three areas are 1) Coronado, 2) Downtown San Diego, and 3) San Diego Coastal. The other 12 areas are free rebid areas for our purposes. This is an amazingly high number of free rebid areas and that will give us a ton of flexibility when creating hotel bidding strategies for San Diego. This article will demonstrate how to use BidSmartForHotels.com’s hotel bidding strategy generator to generate an effective bidding strategy that will allow us to bid multiple times without the 24 hour wait period that Priceline’s requires between issuing the same bid.
Why does this work so well in San Diego? It’s simply because Priceline® allows you to rebid immediately if you can change something about your bid. With so many areas in San Diego that do not offer 4-Star Deluxe hotels, we are safe to add these areas as long as we keep bidding for a 4-Star Deluxe. And if we apply a little combinatorial math to the bidding scheme and are willing to log out of our Priceline® account and log back in, our bids are virtually limitless as you will see. The algorithm that BidSmartForHotels.com’s hotel bidding strategy generator uses does all the hard work for us.
Example: Creating a Priceline bidding strategy for a 4-Star Deluxe hotel in San Diego
Using the link presented in step one of the Strategy Generator, we open a new window to Priceline®, click on the Name Your Own Price® link, enter San Diego, CA into the city text field, enter our dates, and then click on the “bid now” button. We are then presented with a list of available bidding areas for San Diego.
Moving on to step two, we need to enter the name and maximum star level into the Bidding Generator for each and every bidding area. We start by selecting the Coronado area noting that the highest star level that becomes active is the 4-Star Deluxe level in the star level list. We enter Coronado into the the Area Name and select 4-Star Deluxe from Maximum Star Level and then click the Add Area button. The information for the Coronado area is added to the bidding areas table. We then deselect the Coronado area and click the Del Mar area noting that the 3 1/2-Star Upscale-Plus level is the highest star level that becomes active. Once again we add this information into the Strategy Generator. We repeat this for each available area. Remember that you should only have one area selected at a time. After we are done, the bidding areas table looks similar to the following:
| Area Name | Maximum Star Level |
|---|---|
| Coronado | 4-Star Deluxe |
| Del Mar | 3 1/2-Star Upscale-Plus |
| Downtown San Diego | 4-Star Deluxe |
| El Cajon – Santee | 3-Star Upscale |
| Escondido – Vista | 2 1/2-Star Moderate-Plus |
| La Mesa | 3-Star Upscale |
| Miramar – Rancho Penasquitos | 3-Star Upscale |
| Mission Valley | 3 1/2-Star Upscale-Plus |
| National City – Chula Vista | 2-Star Moderate |
| North County Coastal | 3 1/2-Star Upscale-Plus |
| Point Loma – Shelter Island | 3-Star Upscale |
| Rancho Bernardo | 3 1/2-Star Upscale-Plus |
| San Diego Coastal | 4-Star Deluxe |
| San Ysidro – Mexico Border | 2-Star Moderate |
| Sorrento Mesa | 3-Star Upscale |
In step 3, we select our desired bidding star level of 4-Star Deluxe.
In step 4, we select our desired bidding area out of the 3 areas that offer 4-Star Deluxe hotels. These areas are 1) Coronado, 2) Downtown San Diego, and 3) San Diego Coastal.
In step 5, we must define our bidding range. Please remember that this is purely your decision and only place dollar amounts which our within your budget and with which you feel comfortable. It’s advisable that you research hotel prices on the internet to help you set your maximum bid. Once again, it’s your choice. If you have time before your trip, remember that it’s ok to aim low because if your bid attempts fail you can try again after waiting 24 hours and raise your range a bit.
In step 6, we select which strategy generation mode should be used. We are presented with three options: Simple (selected by default), Advanced, and Expert. Given the high number of free rebid areas, it’s likely that the simple mode will be sufficient. The simple mode is the easiest mode to use and it will not require you to log out, but it will usually give you fewer bids. Often, this is an acceptable compromise.
Given so many free rebid areas available to us — there really isn’t a bad strategy generation mode for us to use. The expert mode will give us up to an insane 4096 bids, and that is clearly overkill. The advanced mode will give us up to 24 bids, and the simple mode will give us up to 13 bids which is more than enough. It seems reasonable to select the simple mode. You should try generating strategies under each mode and pick the one you prefer.
In step 7, we simply click the Generate strategy now button and we will be presented with a bidding strategy to follow. It’s as simple as that to generate a Priceline® hotel bidding strategy for a 4-Star Deluxe hotel in San Diego.
It should also be noted that San Diego is a great city in which to bid for a 3 1/2-Star Upscale-Plus since bidding at that star level will give you 8 free rebid areas. The only difference is that you would select a desired area that has 3 1/2-Star Upscale-Plus available and select 3 1/2-Star Upscale-Plus from the desired star level in step 3.
We hope you found this example useful.
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