I will be travelling this summer quite a bit (more detailes to be disclosed later!) and for starters I had to book a rental car as well as a hotel room in Seattle for 1 night for next week. While I was looking at options through my BCAA membership website (they give me some discounts), my friend told me about www.priceline.com. And no, this is NOT a pay-per-post or a review-me-post. This is simply a review out of my own personal experience, referred to by a friend.

The concept is this - you can either book the hotel at the regular rate (usually for 4-star hotels, over $200 US a night), or you can call your own price.

Here’s how it works : you can select an area (for example, Seatac Airport, or downtown Seattle) and then start the star scale (they tell you what the median price is for that class of a hotel in that region). Once those are selected, you call a price. In my case, I tossed in $100 US as my offer, while the median price was $239. After that, they inform you that there are service charges of $22.xx or so, which brings this to a total of $122.xx.

Now, here’s the exciting catch : once you make the bid, you must put in a credit card # and full personal information, and when you click the button, the system starts searching. If the system happens to find any available hotels within your price bid range/area/star scale, it will automatically book it for you, charge your credit card, and it’s a done deal. You cannot change or cancel your reservation and there are no refunds. For giving you a great deal, you cannot treat this like a generic booking with tonnes of freedom. Oh well, not a bad thing at the end!

So yes, there’s how I scored a room at the Sheraton Seattle for myself for $122 a night!

How can they afford this? I suspect that every hotel has surpluses of rooms and instead of letting them sit at $0 a night, they may as well toss it out at half price without publicly advertising it (which will piss off other customers who paid full price), they give a certain portion of rooms to priceline.com, which brings them some revenue rather than none. Besides, chances are I will be using other services at the hotel (drinks, food and more) so it should be a good way to scoop up some extra revenue for the hotels, while I get a killer deal.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 10:42 am and is filed under Cool Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.