Bidding for a 4* Hotel in New York City on Priceline.com®

We all know that nice hotel rooms in New York City can be costly. Priceline® can help you save substantial money on your accommodations. Here is an example of a hotel bidding strategy that was generated using BidSmartForHotels.com’s strategy generator for bidding on a 4* hotel in New York’s Midtown West bidding area. This example should only be used to illustrate how easy it is to create a bidding strategy for New York City using our site. Since bidding areas and maximum star levels can change on a daily basis, you must generate your own new strategy. Please do not use this strategy as it is presented here.

Example: Generating a Priceline® Bidding Strategy for a 4-Star Deluxe hotel in New York’s Midtown West area

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 New York City, NY 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 New York City.

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 Brooklyn and noting that the highest star level that becomes active is the 3½-Star Upscale-Plus. We enter Brooklyn and 3½-Star Upscale-Plus into the Area Name and Maximum Star Level and then click the Add Area button. The information for Brooklyn is added to the bidding areas table. We then deselect the Brooklyn area and click the Central Park Area noting that the 4-Star Deluxe area 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. After we are done, the bidding areas table looks similar to the following:

In step 3, we select our desired bidding star level of 4-Star Deluxe.

In step 4, we select our desired bidding area of Midtown West.

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. For the sake of this example we enter a starting bid of $65 and a maximum bid of $125.

In step 6, we select which strategy generation mode should be used. We are presented with three options: Expert (selected by default), Advanced, and Simple. The advantage of the expert mode is that it will produce the maximum amount of bids thus giving you the best chance of winning a hotel at the lowest price. But there is a disadvantage. The Expert mode will usually require you to logout of Priceline® one or more times. Conversely, the simple mode will not require you to logout but will usually give you far fewer bids. This can be an acceptable compromise because the simple mode is easier to use. For this example, we will choose the expert mode, but please experiment with the other modes to figure out which you prefer.

In step 7, we simply click the Generate strategy now button and we are presented with the following bidding strategy:

We then simply follow the step by step instructions in the bidding strategy table hopefully winning a hotel room at a great rate. And if we don’t win? Wait the Priceline® lockout period of 24 hours and generate the strategy again. Once again please remember that you must generate a new strategy and not use the strategy as presented here because bidding areas and maximum star areas can change at anytime.

The bidding strategy example presented here was created using the Strategy Generator available free of charge at BidSmartForHotels.com. Happy Bidding!