<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by pynchonesque:
I wonder if, with Sheryl's board around, Priceline now occasionally randomizes, and rejects high bids, just to raise the perceived minimum bid that is shared on these boards.
So why does Priceline have the 15 minute wait? Is it to discourage automated probing of their system? And/Or perhaps to bolster the idea that Priceline is calling travel providers to shop your bid around?</font>
First, I don't think they could reject bids because it would probably be in violation of their agreement with the providers (airlines/hotels/rental car agencies) to reject an acceptable bid.
Second, I think the 15 minutes is to account for processing time and such. I've seen Orbitz take one minute to process requests ... same with Expedia and such ... and Priceline's process is probably even slower than that, especially when you get to approving it and creating the records in the CRS and in Priceline's computers, etc., etc., etc. There may also be a queue so that at peak times they don't have to have the computing power to handle all requests simultaneously, which makes sense from a business point of view. It also makes incremental bidding of only $1 much more time consuming ... which can be done through various rebidding strategies and tricks ...
As a final thought, I think Priceline is happy to just collect their $5.95 (of course, the problem is the free bonus money they're still giving away) ... then they get a little gravy on top of that with some bids ...