Part Two »

#1 Our Priceline Bidding Strategy

Tags: Priceline, Tips, Bid, Strategy, Re-bid, Zone, Price

This is a rather personal testimony which may not work for everyone. It works well for us but requires some time and patience.
1. We review possible hotels in each zone/star level category using the iBidlow Priceline hotel database

2. We consult with the iBidlow average price index to determine a bidding price target. If the price index has no data for a zone, we rely on the ‘best market price’ index and bid only below it.

3. We build a zone strategy. At first, we would never use more than one zone in the initial bid. We then review all zones in a city that don’t have hotels in our star category or higher, and would use them when re-bidding. You can follow the movie embedded below to see how this strategy works in practice. The main idea is to resume bidding with slightly increased bids (say, $1) until the price is accepted or until the re-bidding zones are all used.

4. We would usually bid for a category higher than our target (i.e. 4-star instead of 3.5 star) – but will only do that after verifying that the hotels offered on the 4-star category also meet our needs. If the bid is rejected, we can simply bid for our original star category with no extra hassle.