Priceline Reviews | Priceline.com

Rating: 3.6/4 (8 votes cast)

Choose your exact airline tickets, hotels or rental cars – OR – Use Priceline Negotiator. “Name Your Own Price”. If you are flexible enough to agree to fly any time of day, on any major airline and stay in any name-brand hotel, utilize the option to bid your own price on airline tickets and hotels.
You can save up to 50% *. Name Your Own Price Hotel – See Winning Bids in Top Cities.
60-second response time to “Name Your Own Price”.
Compare over 60,000 hotels worldwide.
“Best Price Guarantee” *. 100% refund within 24 hours of a “Name Your Own Price” Priceline negotiator purchase.
“Quality Experience Guarantee” *. If you bid on Priceline airline tickets or hotels they will make some guarantees. For airline tickets: generally no red-eye or off-peak flights, only one-stop each way, and no layovers over 3 hours. For hotels: Priceline rates hotels and assigns “star-levels”. Thus, you will be booked only into hotels that are within the star-level that you agree to.
Priceline “PriceBreakers” : Daily travel deals. Sign up to have them delivered to your inbox.
Group hotel search engine. For 10 or more rooms.
Priceline Cruises: 23 U.S. ports, 155 ships, 18 cruise lines
City Guides
Traveler hotel reviews
Bonus Cash Rewards

The Good: Priceline is the first major travel site to offer no booking fees* on published airline tickets. They also seem to have lower fees than other major travel sites, all around. We see that Priceline’s hotel selection is huge (60,000), and believe it is larger than any other travel site we’ve researched. We love to book rental cars with using Priceline’s “Name Your Own Price” bidding option. The bidding risk is small, and they are really cheap! Place your bid at about 15%-30% less than the lowest price you can find.

The Bad: Always keep Priceline’s cancellation policy in mind, if you are unsure about your travel plans, then we recommend that you do not bid, but rather make a “fixed price” purchase (see “the small print”). When you make a Name Your Own Price (Priceline Negotiator) reservation, it is always non-refundable. Make sure your travel plans are solid. The Priceline bidding process can be a little confusing if you are not experienced. We have a few bidding tips for you below.

Priceline Bidding Tips: If you lose a bid on hotels, you are not allowed to re-bid unless you change your star-level or add an area. Which brings us to INSIDER BIDDING TIP#1: If you are bidding on 4-Star hotels and add an “area” that has no 4 star hotels, you will be able to re-bid without really changing anything! Otherwise, you will need to wait 24 hours to re-bid. INSIDER BIDDING TIP#2: Keep hotel booking fees in mind. Bid at least $20/night less than the going rate, or else it is not really worth it. You will not know the name of your hotel or airline until after the non-refundable reservation has been made. If you are bidding on a hotel, check the “star-level” of the hotel you are interested in and see what other hotels are listed within the same star-level in your destination. We highly recommend selecting “4 Star”. INSIDER BIDDING TIP #3: Verify that ALL of the hotels within your desired “star-level” are acceptable, because you may get ANY hotel within that star-level. If all of the hotels are acceptable, by all means, start a bid.

How do I start a bid, you ask? Go to the hotel search engine and enter in your “destination city”, “dates”, and “Search Hotels Now”. At the top of the next page it will pull up a little grid. Along the top of the grid it will specify “1 star”, “2 star”, ect. Click on the star-level you prefer. Scroll down, and it will pull up ONLY hotels within that star-level. If all hotels in that star-level meet your expectations, start a bid! If not, play it safe and go ahead and choose your exact hotel and book it with the fixed price offered.

The Fees*:

No booking fees on all published airline tickets.
Priceline Name Your Own Price (Priceline Negotiator) purchases carry a variable booking fee. This is disclosed after your bid is accepted.
Priceline Name Your Own Price (Priceline Negotiator) purchases are non-refundable and unchangeable.
For all other purchases, the cancellation policy varies per booking. Read the cancellation policy on the booking page before you buy.

*Based solely on research done by TravelSiteCritic.com, and may be inaccurate and subject to change.

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