Nobody's mentioned much about Priceline here, but I totally agree that it has a place - especially since there are a couple different sites on the Internet that effectively remove the opaqueness by showing exactly what to bid and what hotels the winners are getting.

We use Priceline fairly often, primarily for the following:

- Airport hotels where our arrival is late and departure is early. This exact pattern fits most of our airport hotel stays - the whole reason we're there to begin with is usually because of a 6AM flight. I've found that status means little to nothing on these stays, so might as well just save the cash. Typical $150/nt. Marriott ends up being about $60 all in on Priceline.

- Roadtripping stays where the only category to bid is 2.5* - stuff like HIX, Sleep Inn, Hampton, etc. Again, status means nothing at these places and everybody in the hotel eats the same breakfast. Had one 3 weeks ago in rural Iowa where all of these places would have been about $110 with taxes: $52 all in got the HIX.

- Booking multiple rooms for several nights at a 4* type hotel, even if the city has my "Platinum" options available. Here's where you simply do the math, assume that a Priceline stay will yield the worst possible treatment, and then decide if the difference in price is worth it. My best example: I needed 4 rooms for 5 nights in Woodley Park, DC once in late May a few years ago - a fairly in-demand time to go to Washington DC. Marriotts and Starwoods were all $250+ per room per night. So I bid right around $100 on Priceline (it might have been $105...) and ended up with the OMNI. The $6,000 all in tab at Marriott became a $2,500 tab at OMNI. We decided that having four run-of-the-house rooms, no lounge access, and having to wander down the street for breakfast was worth saving three grand. And as it turned out, the OMNI *didn't* treat us poorly or dump us into bad rooms at all - and they even provided their normal complimentary morning juice/coffee service. ^