Booking with "We'll tell you the hotel name after you pay" - Your experience?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Yes, one of the things to bear in mind is “stars” in hotel booking sites tend to be rather idiosyncratically assigned, often on the basis of a combination of user ratings (how badly can you complain about a $40 room?) and some checklist that may not be what you look for (coffee and bagels for “continental breakfast” is not really that meaningful if you’re in the middle of a busy business district with many eateries). You also have the self-selection factor, some hotels and/or their chains may not participate in the opaque-bid service at all and thus skew the averages.

BetterBidding and other similar sites do provide users with strategies to use the system itself to try and iterate down the search to better match acceptable bid with desirable service level/location. But even they will tell you you are not getting Midtown the first week of December for $60.

22

Wouldn’t you be better off simply choosing a hotel in the area with the price you want?

23

That’s exactly what you do. It’s just that instead of a Comfort Inn you end up at a Grand Hyatt for the same price.

24

I use Name Your Own Price on Priceline all the time. I love it. You can game it a little by restricting by star-rating and location and then looking at the prices. If you restrict it to 3 stars and don’t like what you see, bump it up. Assume you’re going to have to bid 60-65% of the price of the hotel you want to have a shot at it. Sometimes you can score big with a low bid, but experience has taught me that 65% is about right.

Besides, if you restrict it to 3.5-4 star hotels, it’s not like you’re going to get a bad one, and if you’re looking at <=2 star hotels, it doesn’t really matter which one you get.

25

Instead of “naming your own price” a lot of them (priceline, travelocity) also have a “Top Secret” listing where they show you the star rating and average review rating, but not hte hotel name, and you get a sizable discount. Since I know one hotel in particular that I have used regularly from both “name your own price” and “top secret” I have tried bidding and have never saved more than just a couple bucks using bids vs naming my price.

Some of the sites guarantee you will not get a hotel with a low approval rating (ie a really crappy hotel).

26

I’ve used both with plenty of success.

One thing I have noticed, is that it seems like subsequent bids are more likely to get accepted.

If I bid for a hotel in Chicago @ $65 today, they may say no.

I bid for same criteria tomorrow, same price, they may say yes.

I bid for same criteria next day,same price, it seems like I usually get it.

I’ve seen it in rental cars as well.

It makes a certain kind of sense, but I was surprised.

27

I did this for a Washington DC trip once. The site gave me enough of a description of the place that we were able to figure out what hotel it was. It worked out well for us.

28

I’ve only had one so-so experience with name your own price. I got the Sheraton in downtown Columbus, Ohio. The hotel itself was fine but the only parking was valet at $25 per day and the wait for the valet was long. On the other hand,the hotel restaurant was reasonably priced for a hotel restaurant.