Bidding for a 4-Star Deluxe hotel in Miami on Priceline®

Looking for sun, surf, and super models. Miami is a hip destination and fortunately you can save a money on 4-Star Deluxe hotel rooms using Priceline®’s Name Your Own Price® service. Currently on Priceline, out of the 11 areas offered, 6 areas offer 4-Star Deluxe hotels. These areas are 1) Coral Gables – Coconut Grove, 2) Miami Airport (MIA), 3) Miami Beach, 4) Miami Downtown, 5) North Miami Beach, and 6) South Beach. The other 5 areas are free rebid areas for our purposes and give us a ton of flexibility when creating hotel bidding strategies for Miami. 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 Miami? It’s simply because Priceline® allows you to rebid immediately if you can change something about your bid. With so many areas in Miami that do not offer 4* hotels, we are safe to add these areas as long as we keep bidding for a 4-Star Deluxe hotel. 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 Miami

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 Miami, FL 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 Miami.

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 Aventura area noting that the highest star level that becomes active is the 3-Star Upscale level in the star level list. We enter Aventura into the the Area Name and select 3-Star Upscale from Maximum Star Level and then click the Add Area button. The information for the Aventura area is added to the bidding areas table. We then deselect the Aventura area and click the Coral Gables – Coconut Grove area noting that the 4-Star Deluxe 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:

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 6 areas that offer 4-Star Deluxe hotels. These areas are 1) Coral Gables – Coconut Grove, 2) Miami Airport (MIA), 3) Miami Beach, 4) Miami Downtown, 5) North Miami Beach, and 6) South Beach.

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 what you enter. 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.

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. 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 fewer bids. Often, this can be an acceptable compromise because the simple mode is easier to use.

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 32 bids. The advanced mode will give us up to 10 bids, and the simple mode will give us up to 6 bids. It would seem reasonable to select either the advanced or 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 a simple as that to generate a Priceline® hotel bidding strategy for a 4-Star Deluxe hotel in Miami.

Are you ready to give it try? If you are planning that Miami trip and you are looking to save money on your accommodations, head on over to BidSmartForHotels.com and generate you very own bidding strategy. If you are planning a trip in the future to Miami and aren’t quite ready to bid on a room, please bookmark this page and give it try when you are ready. Good luck!

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