<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by divaof travel:
Tummy - Can you book a specific hotel on Priceline? I have tried the site a few times, and I thought the whole concept was that you pay before they tell you which hotel (or airline or car rental company) you will be using.
It seems to me that I can only bid on a 3 star property, which includes the Hyatt and, according to biddingfortravel.com, about 5 other properties. I guess I could save a few bucks, but I know Hyatt will upgrade me and give me breakfast coupons (in ddition to the FFNs)
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After looking at the bid amounts for the previous few weeks you can get a good idea of what certain hotels are selling for. I'll give you an example, when bidding for *3 in Orlando near Disney, it's a good bet that you will get the Hyatt if you bid $35. If you bid $32 you will likely get the Sheraton Safari.
Another example that worked for me, in Anaheim California, in the past the Hyatt near Disneyland would always come up as *3 and $28 per night. I bid that exact amount and got it on the first try.
I'm not saying that it's a guarantee, but you have very good chance to get exactly what you want if you bid the amounts posted by knowledgeable people from the site. It's worked almost every time for me. The only time it didn't was when I got the Crowne Plaza at LAX airport instead of the Marriott, like I was expecting.
In most cases I have been able to save nearly $100 per night / room. We're staying in orlando in August for $35 /nt at the Hyatt Orlando. I bid for 2 rooms and got them on the first try (8 total room nights). That saved me around $450, in comparison to the lowest rate listed on Hyatt.com for the same property and dates. While to some people, that's not a lot of money, but it can at least buy us a nice dinner. I didn't feel that any of the two Hyatt's in Orlando was worth the use of my FFNs.
I suggest you check out of the FAQ on the BFT web site, if you're still interested.