If you want amazing deals on hotels, without getting just “cheap hotels” – Priceline is an interesting tool. Priceline has great deals, but you don’t know what hotel you’re going to get with the “blind” bidding process. A number of sites help you narrow down these predictions and even understand the general level of bidding prices on Priceline for a given market. The sites have been around for years, but exist “undercover” since they move into a grey area of subverting the channel segmentation that allows Priceline to offer excess hotel inventory at lower prices. We’ve used the sites and saved regularly 65% or more from the posted hotel rates at major brand hotels including Marriott and Doubletree. Check it out for your next trip – if you can take a bit of randomness with your hotel selection – Priceline “prediction” sites help to narrow that down considerably and set the lowest possible bid.
Bidlesstravel (http://www.bidlesstravel.com) is another “Predictor” site I found on Twitter, insofar as it has a database of winning bids that you can query by state/city/zone/etc. One more is BetterBidding. Both of which seem superior to BFT, which bans half of the people who don’t click on their priceline affiliate links.