Online Travel Booking and Bidding Agencies - PL or similar in Europe?

I'm trying to book a room for 5 nights in MSP starting Friday. I've had successful bids but they say they can't complete my purchase because they were unable to charge the credit card.

My cards all have the same billing address in Spain and it isn't possible to mangle it to fit the form and pass the checks on either the PL.com or PL.co.uk sites, as indicated by the FAQ on biddingfortravel.

Anyone have other suggestions for booking a cheap hotel? PL is coming out less than half of hotwire for similar properties.



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-alan in sitges, home of Si-Do (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum95/HTML/003150.html)

Do a search for Priceline (possibly in the archives). The 2 Asian sites have address input for multiple countries and seem to accept credit cards that the U.S. site will not.

You'll have to convert SGD and HKD to USD though the latter is easy being pegged at HKD 7.8/USD. Just use the current spot rate to convert your "successful" bid.

The two sites are
http://www.priceline.com.hk

and

http://www.priceline.com.sg

It's just a matter of preference which site you use.

On either site, you have more options for rebidding than you do with Priceline.com. You can do all the things with free rebid zones that you can with Priceline.com, but you also have the option to raise your bid by a set amount (the equivalent of about $6 US), and you can also rebid after 24 hours.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by WillTravel:
. . . you also have the option to raise your bid by a set amount (the equivalent of about $6 US) . . .</font>

That's the real treasure to using Priceline's Asia sites. As of today, there's no consequence to significantly underbidding except a little wasted time. Great for the penny pinching traveler.

I've been having trouble with bidding on those sites in the last couple days. I sent an email to customer service. Here is the main part of the response:

We apologize for the inconvenience caused. The error messages you received are due to our system upgrading work. The database would be up from 1/Sep/2003.

What happened is that I put a bid in, and got a response that a hotel would have accepted my bid, but that I needed a new credit card. Then my next credit card got the same message. So far as I could tell, there was nothing wrong with my credit cards, thus I sent the emails. I now doubt the bids were actual winners - they were quite low rates.

So any bids you try before September 1 might not work out regardless (they really should put a notice up if this is widespread).

[This message has been edited by WillTravel (edited 08-28-2003).]