Has anyone on the board used Priceline.com and been successful? What about any other deeply discounted travel sites?
The reason I ask is because I’d like to visit family in Asheville, NC in either September or October, before it starts to get too chilly. (I don’t have a car, otherwise I’d drive. It’s a rather enjoyable road trip, actually.) I went on orbitz, travelocity, expedia, etc., and came up with an average figure of $330 round trip. I even played around with dates and times but it didn’t make a difference.
Folks, this is just waaaay too friggin’ expensive for my liking.
I don’t know of any airline that will fly directly into Asheville from Tampa, FL; there’s usually a stopover in Charlotte or Raleigh/Durham. I’ve even tried going thru Greyhound or Amtrak and it’ll be almost as expensive and take me five times longer to get there. So my thought was to place a bid on Priceline for say, $198 (since that’s within the 40% possible savings range) and see what happens.
Unless a member of the SDMB has an aircraft of their own and would be willing to help me out…I’ll give ya $200 in return!
I know several people who have been more than happy with what they got on priceline. Only drawback is you can’t choose a time, just a date.
If you’re going anyway, put in a low price and work up - you’ve got nowt to lose.
I believe this is being changed - if it hasn’t already. I seem to remember seeing commercials here in the U.S. that say you’re allowed to choose time and airline.
I think that you’re both right. The new version supposedly allows you to choose time and airline, (like orbitz), but to get the really deep discounts you have to use the ‘just date’ option that has always been the gimmick of priceline.
Have you checked into “TED” (United’s new ecomony airline)? They do fly out of FL, and they are REALLY cheap, especially if you book at least two weeks in advance.
I’ve been happy with them. I’ve used them twice. Once we got a round trip flight from Chicago to Oklahoma for $150. The second time, we got three round trip tickets from OKC to Oregon for about half of what everyone else was charging.
We did the “just dates” version - it is cheaper than if you put in the times, airline, etc. in the newer version.
We always start with a bid of about $50. If I understand correctly, if an airline won’t come down to that price, Priceline automatically kicks out the lowest price and you have the option of buying.
I’ve had very, very good luck with Priceline for car rental.
I’ve had decent luck for airline tickets. I got NY-to-SF (San Jose, actually) for $94 each way. I accepted it, because it was well below what I could get elsewhere, but I was hoping for lower. Still, it was a good deal.
We haven’t had any luck with Priceline. No bad experiences, just no luck. We recently tried to book a vacation package through them and couldn’t get anywhere. We kept getting error messages that our options were not available, but they wouldn’t tell us what the problem was. No matter what we changed, they still couldn’t process our request. (We ended up trying through Expedia and go exactly what we wanted, for only about $25 more than the price Priceline quoted.)
If you can wait that long, you might find that fares go down closer to the date(s) you want to travel. You can usually get the best rates 14-30 days ahead of time. This far in advance, you are probably going to get a crappy rate. Keep trying. Check out CheapTickets.com, too - they have some good fares from time to time. And check directly with whatever airlines service Tampa airport. Sometimes you can get the best rates directly from them.
