Tips & Tricks: How to Use Priceline - Simplified (2024)

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For the longest time, Priceline’s “Name Your Own Price” was a hidden (albeit unnecessarily complicated way) to get amazing deals on hotels. With this feature now sun-setted, Priceline is now turning to Pricebreakers and Express Deals to get you hotel deals.

In this article, we’re going to break down how each of these features work, whether they’re worth using, and also different tricks to make sure you get what you’re looking for.

This is Priceline for dummies.

What is Priceline?

Priceline is owned by Booking Holdings Inc. and that name should sound familiar because Booking.com has certainly skyrocketed these past 10 years as one of the de-facto hotel booking platforms.

That said, Priceline has continued to chug along and retained its position in the market alongside other subsidiaries which also include Kayak, Agoda, Cheapflights, Rentalcars, Momondo, and OpenTable.

Priceline is most popularly used in the USA where it has the strongest portfolio. Customers primarily use the platform to book hotels but you can also find flights, car rentals, and cruises.

When Priceline was its strongest, William Shatner was one of the spokespeople for the brand with the role of “Price negotiator”. This fell in line with features such “Name Your Own Price”.

Priceline is a website that sells discounted everything from hotels, car rentals and flights. When you do a normal search for hotels on it you can get some decent deals but the tricks it to learn how to use the bidding tool called “Name Your Own Price”.

Priceline’s Pricebreakers

One of the latest features on Priceline is Pricebreakers. This is a tool that claims that the price of hotels are up to 50% off retail.

While similar to Express Deals, it’s different because instead of showing the geographical location and its perimeter, it gives you names of 3 hotels that could be anywhere in your destination of interest. One of them is yours if you book but you just don’t know which.

If you want to get a sure thing, you can also opt to pay the listed “retail” for the hotel. This is the same as going to any hotel booking platform and just paying straight-up.

What you need to know

Here are a few things that you’re probably already wondering about:

• Taxes and fees: The Pricebreaker listed price does not include taxes and fees. Priceline says that these are estimates and can change.
• Resort fees: The “Additional mandatory fee” line covers things like resort fees but Priceline doesn’t charge that. They do it as a courtesy to let you know that this is an additional fee you’ll have to pay to the hotel directly at checkout. You only pay what’s on the green line “You pay today”.
• Are these refundable?: No, these are not refundable. You can add trip protection for a fee but it is typically not worth it.
• Can pay via PayPal: This is a nice feature that other booking platforms don’t offer.
• Can’t use promo codes: You aren’t able to use promo codes for Pricebreakers.

Comparing Pricebreakers with Booking.com

These days, I use Booking.com for most hotel bookings because of some of the benefits of being Genius member. So let’s actually see if the quoted price savings that Priceline presents is legitimate.

Pricebreakers

For Lihue, Kauai, here’s an example of the first Pricebreaker result that I see and their individual retail rate:

• Aston Islander On The Beach: $169/night
• The ISO: $130/night
• Plantation Hale Suites: $146/night

Total Pricebreaker price: $1093 +$201 = $1294

Booking.com

While you might feel loyalty towards one booking platform, if there’s anything I’ve learned over the years is to not take it for granted that one’s lowest price is truly the lowest price.

By taking each of those 3 properties selected in the Pricebreaker, let’s see how much another platform’s rates are for the same dates.

What makes it hard to compare initially (perhaps on purpose) is that you’ll notice that Booking.com displays the total costs for the stay as opposed to nightly. This means that I’ll need to crunch some numbers first.

• Aston Islander On The Beach: After Genius discount, $199/night (total $1560)
• The ISO: $159/night (total $1481)
• Plantation Hale: $123/night (total $1540)

Note, the total booking prices includes taxes, standard fees, and resort fees to be able to compare apples-to-apples with Priceline.

The Result

When comparing the Priceline Pricebreaker for Kauai to the costs on Booking.com, how does it hold up?

Well, it’s kind of inconclusive because it really depends on what Pricebreakers gets you. If you get the top property (Aston Islander On The Beach), you’re winning. But if you don’t, you could probably get the other properties you win cheaper elsewhere.

That’s how they get you.

If you’re crossing your fingers for something better and looking to play the game, you could certainly try but the cynic in my will tell me that Priceline will always try to dangle the enticing top property on you but give you the cheapest one.

Priceline’s Express Deals

The Express Deals go back to more of Priceline’s own roots where the actual property is shrouded in mystery but you can get a pretty good rate on a hotel.

Contrasting to Pricebreakers, Express Deals only tells you the location, star-rating, and a hint such as showing 3 properties on a map and their regular retail rates.

That’s a lot of information to work with so the advantage of Express Deals is that if you know a few tricks, you can easily narrow down to which hotel you’re getting.

What you need to know

Like Pricebreakers, there are a few things you should know:

• Taxes and fees: The Express Deal listed price does not include taxes and fees but does get included in the final total. Priceline says that these are estimates and can change.
• Resort fees: The “Additional mandatory fee” line covers things like resort fees but Priceline doesn’t charge that. They do it as a courtesy to let you know that this is an additional fee you’ll have to pay to the hotel directly at checkout. You only pay what’s on the green line “You pay today”.
• Are these refundable?: No, these are not refundable. You can add trip protection for a fee but it is typically not worth it.
• Can pay via PayPal: This is a nice feature that other booking platforms don’t offer.
• Can use promo codes: Promo codes can be used here.

How to figure out the exact hotel

To narrow down and hone in on the exact mystery hotel being offered, there are a few tricks of the trade you can employ.

This is best done by using the same Kauai example as I used for the Pricebreakers. Let’s do this step by step.

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Step 1: Do an Express Deal search on Priceline.

Step 2: Look at the Express Deal offer and pay attention to: Location, Star Rating, Room Name, Amenities

Step 3: Head over to Better Bidding’s Priceline Hotel List and narrow down to the state.

Step 4: Expand the region that you’re interested in that’s marked as (Priceline Express Deals) and select all of the appropriate filters.

TIP: Don’t use the “Indoor or Outdoor Pool” and “Free Internet” filters as they seem to cause some issues.

This may not result in narrowing things down but don’t worry if it doesn’t.

Step 5: Pay close attention to the Room naming. In this case it says “One King Bed with Garden or Mountain View”. Go back to Priceline and search for the same destination and dates.

In the example, the only property that has any sort of garden/mountain view is Kauai Beach Resort.

Once you start looking at it side by side, you quickly realize that they’re exactly the same.

However, the final conclusion should still be based on the prices that are marked by the red arrow. Notice how the Express Deal says the original price is $215. While you’d think the “Deluxe Mountain or Garden View Room with King Bed” might be the obvious choice, what you’re really getting is the “Triple Room” which is also 1 King Bed.

Step 6: Book the Priceline Express Deal!

Are Express Deals worth it?

By looking at the Kauai example alone, you can see that they’re not lying. The Express Deal for Kauai Beach Resort is $147 while booking it on its own is $215 which means a savings of $68.

What do you lose? The only difference is that you’re losing free cancellation.

But what about on Booking.com?

The lowest available price on Booking for Kauai Beach Resort is $1559.46 including taxes and charges.

Compare this to $1410.22 with the Priceline Express Deals.

This means you’re saving $149.24!

Of course, every situation is going to be different but this gives you an idea of the power of Priceline Express Deals.

Which is better? Priceline Pricebreakers or Express Deals?

The dreaded “it depends”!

Overall, I have to say that the Express Deals has a lot more potential and here’s why:

• You can narrow it down to the exact property by using the strategies I laid out.
• Coupons codes work so you can save an additional 5% or even higher.
• Overall more control of what you’re getting and less stress over getting a hotel with Pricebreakers that you could’ve gotten cheaper if you just booked it directly.

What about Priceline VIP?

In many ways, Priceline VIP is very similar to Booking.com Genius but with the advantage of getting coupons after each stay.

• Free to join.
• Complete 2 trips and you can start seeing bigger savings on hotels (starting at up to 50% off on over 15,000 hotels).
• When you hit VIP Gold (5 completed trips), you’ll see up to 50% off over 30,000 hotels.
• When you hit VIP Platinum (25 completed trips), you’ll see up to 50% off over 45,000 hotels.
• Insider coupons are issued after every trip starting at 5% and that goes up to 8% and 10% with higher status.

This is the kind of membership where there’s nothing to lose by joining. In all likelihood, the hotel you want is probably not on the 50% off list of properties but you never know!

Remember that the “completed trips” are cumulative from point of joining so this is the kind of program where they do encourage loyalty.

How do these deals compare to “Name Your Own Price”?

It’s hard to compare because you really can’t anymore but with “Name Your Own Price”, despite how complex it was, you do ultimately have a bit more control because you’re the one putting your bid prices in.

What do I mean by that? Keep on reading to find out a bit more about how the legacy “Name Your Own Price” system worked.

What was “Name Your Own Price”?

While at its simplest, Priceline is an Online Travel Agency (OTA), where you simply put in your destination, dates, and various requirements and it spits out a bunch of hotels to choose from.

“Name Your Own Price” was a revolutionary auction system and in the early to mid 2000s, I used it religiously to get the best hotel rates.

The theory was that hotels constantly had excess supply and Priceline came in to allow properties to fill those empty rooms at a lower price through an auction or what we might call gamification these days.

Since you as the traveller is completely blind, you could end up bidding too high and thus winning a room at a higher rate than the property was willing to sell.

Also, since the whole system was built around neighborhood zones, you, as a traveller, also didn’t have direct control over which hotel you were getting so Priceline could allocate winners to whichever property best fit the price based on some sort of algorithm.

Yeah I know, complicated but it somehow worked for those of us that were committed enough to work it in our favor.

How did “Name Your Own Price” work?

The auction system for “Name Your Own Price” was quite complex but the steps looked like this:

• Enter in your basic hotel specifications (location, dates, rooms) as you normally would.
• Enter “Name Your Own Price” mode when prompted by a call to action button.
• You were then asked to choose your zone, star, and set a price. A city was broken down into various neighborhoods.
• Submit your “bid”.
• Priceline would send you an e-mail for whether you won or not.
• If you didn’t win, you could try again by changing your requirements (adding additional zones, lowering stars) while also increasing your price or start from scratch 24 hours later.
• Repeat this until you eventually win.

Why was “Name Your Own Price” so good?

The magic happens when you tapped into forums like Better Bidding where you could essentially figure out what hotels were in which zones, taking out the guess work of what you might be getting. Furthermore, Better Bidding also showed you the star ratings for the hotels.

What you could do is then take advantage of the fact that some zones only had one 4-star hotel. Combine this with zones that only had 3.5 stars or lower, you could really manipulate the system.

By slowly incrementing your bids by $2 and working your way through zones, you could easily score the lowest-acceptable rate by a hotel in big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, or New York City.

Trust me, it worked!

Why “Name Your Own Price” was also terrible

If your brain is exploding from all the gibberish above, “Name Your Own Price” was also incredibly complicated if you didn’t understand the hacks and tricks you could use.

Even if you did understand the rules of the game, it was also incredibly time intensive. You couldn’t just go to Priceline, enter in your details, and book a hotel all in one session.

You literally needed to grind it out for a couple of days to maybe have a chance of getting what you want.

In that way, “Name Your Own Price” was so niche and didn’t always work.

Don’t forget about Hotwire

Hotwire grew up with Priceline and in many ways, they offer a similar Express Deal feature with mystery hotels.

Looks pretty close to Express Deals right?

Similar to Priceline, the key is to use Better Bidding’s hotel list to easily figure out what hotel it is so you can book with confidence.

Hotwire also makes it pretty easy by showing the property’s hotel.

Frequently asked questions

Much has changed in the world of Priceline but hopefully you’ll be able to find a great deal for a hotel whether with Pricebreakers or Express Deals! Drop a comment below if you’d like to share your success!