Priceline has begun to cut out the cancellation and change fees for any "published price" reservation. These are reservations where you can pick a specific hotel to stay at rather than go through the blind booking process.
Name-your-price hotel bookings however are still iron-clad reservations meaning no refunds, no cancellations and no changes at all.
Additionally, the company said they would lower the booking fees on published-price reservations too. But Travel Weekly says be careful:
Because Priceline lumps hotel taxes and service fees together when displaying prices, the consumer cannot tell how much lower the booking fee is.
Dropping fees and charges is good to hear but just remember to always read the fine print when making any sort of reservation to see just what the cancellation or change policy is.
Over at About.com's Budget Travel site there's an excellent rundown on how to score a hotel deal through Priceline. The writer wanted to stay in downtown Indianapolis for a sporting event but didn't want to pay the $140 a night he was seeing on the usual booking sites. So he checked the message boards, went to Priceline, and scored a deal for $60.47 after fees and taxes. He doesn't say which hotel he scored, but judging by what's on the BiddingForTravel board, it was the Omni Severin or the downtown Hyatt Indianapolis.
We have had our own frequent success with this method, scoring cut-rate deals on leftover rooms at Hotel President in Kansas City, Millennium St. Louis, and the Omni Shoreham in Washington, D.C. We also managed a bargain all-inclusive deal in the Bahamas by visiting the message boards before hitting Hotwire. As we showed last year, it's even possible to score an under-$200 room in Manhattan if you do it right.
If you're the type that doesn't mind paying list price for the satisfaction of knowing which hotel you're sleeping in for the night, then never mind. But if the general location and star level matter more than which chain's logo is on the building, you can save a bundle this way.
If this hotel maven had not grown up in Norwalk, in Fairfield County, Connecticut, she may have never noticed that three pioneering travel companies call her one-time hometown home.
Virgin Atlantic's U.S. headquarters are based in this coastal town of nearly 90,000. Priceline and Kayak have their main offices in Norwalk, too.
Despite an influx of corporate offices over the years, Fairfield County remains more a bedroom community than commerce or, for that matter, leisure-travel central, with hotel selections far and few between.
Just where do these travel concerns, which collectively book hundreds if not thousands of people in hotels around the world every single day, put up their guests when they come to town?
Sure, Priceline and Hotwire work great when you want to find a deal in the Bahamas or get a chain hotel room in bizcity, USA, but what about in the high-occupancy alternate universe known as New York City? Twice in past years we've gotten a room there for less than $150 through one of these services, but as demand has risen and supply has only slightly nudged up, how's it looking now?
Not all that bad, actually, assuming there's not some convention going on and it's not a holiday weekend. When we surfed over to the NYC message board at Bidding for Travel, here are some of the recent Priceline deals people have posted. All are total nightly rates with taxes and fees:
Hilton (midtown west) $174
Grand Hyatt (midtown east) $167
Paramount (midtown west) $195
Sheraton (midtown west--pictured here) $125
Hudson Hotel (Central Park) $181
Le Parker Meridien (upper midtown) $191
Some look at that whole bidding process as a game with a great payoff, but others find it too time-consuming and daunting. If you're in the latter camp, go to Hotwire and see what's on offer. If you do some sleuthing on BetterBidding.com, you'll often get a pretty clear idea of what hotels are hidden behind the descriptions.
When we pulled up next weekend (April 13-15), we found 18 hotels on offer, but most of them in the $200 to $300 range. The obvious deal was a 4-star hotel in midtown east for $175 (plus tax and fees). We didn't dig into the listing to figure out which one that is, but the likely culprits, based on previous transactions posted, are not a bad bunch: Grand Hyatt, W New York, Omni Berkshire, and Inter-Continental the Barclay. Your mileage may vary, but any one of those would be a bargain at that price.
There are drawbacks of course. You pay in advance, without knowing the hotel, so you've got to be sure you'll get to your destination on time. If you want a specific place and a specific experience, doing it this way is risky. If you just need a reliable hotel at a good price, however, do some sleuthing. You can grab a room that the hotel would rather part with at a discount than leave empty and make nothing. Everybody wins.
Priceline has begun to cut out the cancellation and change fees for any "published price" reservation. These are reservations where you can pick a specific hotel to stay at rather than go through the blind booking process.
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by juliana
