Priceline – How we Grabbed a Cheap New York Hotel

New York City hotels are notoriously expensive, we were looking at paying $80-90 for a room with a shared bathroom in a hostel or cheap hotel which seemed pretty cheap by New York standards. After a little more research into how to visit NYC on the cheap I discovered priceline.

Here’s how Priceline works

1. You choose the areas your happy to stay in
2. Select the minimum star rating of the hotel
3. Then the enter your bid
4. Enter your credit card details, and go! 
5. Priceline then goes of and finds a hotel that matches your criteria and is willing to accept your room bid.
6. WARNING: If you get a hotel you have to accept it, there’s no going back!

The thought of paying without out knowing which hotel we would get was a little unnerving but at the end of the day, its just a bed and on our tight budget it was a gamble well worth taking.

After the initial worry that we had blindly put in our credit card details into a website we’d never heard of we have  just confirmed our hotel booking with the Doubletree Metropolatin in New York, its all booked so I feel like we can now celebrate our super saving on our room and big up Priceline. 

Priceline Tips

1. Have a search on tripadvisor for the area you want to go + “priceline” and you’ll see all the people who have successfully got a really cheap hotel, you’ll also get an idea of what sort of bids are likely to be accepted by the hotels.
2. Choose an area your happy to stay in, we selected 4 or 5 central New York locations.
3. Set the number of stars your after, may as well start at the highest!
4. Start you bid low, we went for £55, about $80
5. Gradually alter your bid criteria
6. After changing the stars from 5 down to 3 and a half and the price up to £60 we bagged our Hotel.
7. Once Priceline has confirmed give the hotel a call to let them know any requirements, we made sure we had a non smoking room
8. We’ve booked 5 nights in the 3 1/2 star hotel at £60 a night plus taxes, total £361, which if you check the price on expedia.co.uk or Doubletree’s website is a massive saving of £547 over expedia and around £1000 over the Doubletree website
9. Its as easy as that, sorted!

Give it a try www.priceline.co.uk if your in the UK or www.priceline.com in the US.

Anyone else had any good or bad  priceline experiences?

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