When you bid on a hotel with Priceline you are allowed to select what area of town you want to stay

Obviously, the biggest impediment for most people using Priceline for a hotel is not knowing what hotel you are bidding on.  The 24 hour rule is also annoying because chances are you are only bidding on a certain star level in a certain area of town.  If your bid is rejected it is inconvenient to have to wait 24 hours before making the same bid.  In this section, I will discuss ways to make an educated guess on the hotel you are bidding on and how to overcome the 24 hour rule.  Before we get to that, it is important to start with an explanation of how bidding on a hotel with Priceline works.
When you bid on a hotel with Priceline you are allowed to select what area of town you want to stay in and the star level of the hotel.  I almost always bid on 4-star hotels with Priceline and rarely lower than 3.5 stars. The reasons for that are, one, it narrows down the hotel choices and makes it easier to make an educated guess on what I am bidding on.  And, two, at the 3.5 4 star level I know I will end up in a nice clean hotel.
You can see by looking at the map that there are a number of different zones you can select online travel agent training which are spread all over the Portland metro area.  Zones 9 (NW), 4 (Downtown), and 12 (SW waterfront) are likely the zones of most interest to most people, with zone 4 leading online travel agent training the way.
Once you select a zone you then get to choose your star level.  When you choose a star level, you are bidding on every hotel at that level and above.  Your star level is your floor in terms of quality.
Here, you'll notice that I am using NW Portland as an example.  You will also notice that in the section where you select star level some star levels are gray and cannot be selected.  This is because there are no hotels at those levels in the selected zone (this is something we will use to our advantage later on).
After selecting the zone and star level you then enter a price, but before doing that, we have some homework to do.  First we want to figure out as best we can what hotels we are bidding on and how much we should bid.
After getting a good idea of the boundaries I then open up a new tab and go to Priceline's standard hotel search and click on the map view.  Next, zoom in on an area that roughly covers the same area as the Name Your Own Price map.  Then I select the star rating of for my desired hotel that I will be bidding on.
This gives me a pretty good idea of which 4-star hotels I will be bidding on.  However, a word of caution, I have read anecdotally online about people claiming that the hotel they won on a bid did not match the star rating on Priceline's online travel agent training standard hotel search.  Meaning, they bid on a 4-star but got a 3.5 star or lower.  I believe that in an area where there are only a couple online travel agent training of 4-star hotels Priceline, may be bumping online travel agent training the star level of lower hotels to broaden the bidding online travel agent training base.  For our example, however, there are 11 4-star hotels online travel agent training so that should not be an issue.
I do this to research the various hotels and see if I have any major objections to any of them.  If not, I will continue my research.  If there is a hotel or two I would be really concerned about staying at, then I may decide the risk is not worth it and not bid on a hotel.  But these hotels are all good so I continue my research.
After getting an idea of the hotels I am bidding on I then check out two websites, www.betterbidding.com and www.biddingfortravel.yuku.com .  These websites are forums where people post their winning bids.  On these sites a person online travel agent training will post which zone the hotel is in, star level, the price of the winning bid, and which hotel accepted the bid.  These sites are a wealth of information.  I look at both current bids and historical data to get a good feel of what price I should be bidding.
Lets use July as an example, after looking at these sites I see that 4-star hotels in July, in Downtown are going for about $80/night give or take.  I also notice that 3.5 star hotels are going for about $60/night give or take.
Much like with rental cars unless online travel agent training I am making a last minute trip, the first thing I do is reserve a hotel with a standard online online travel agent training travel agency that will let me cancel 24-72 hours before my stay without penalty.   I always like to have a back up plan which is why I make this reservation.
Then about 2 weeks before my stay I will do all the research described above and bid on a hotel.  I start my first bid about $20 lower then what the winning bids were on the forums.  Why so low?  Because there is a trick that will allow me to make the same bid multiple times so I figure I have nothing to lose.  And if a lower bid is accepted, kudos to me right?
In this example then I would open my bid at $60 for a 4-star hotel.  If/when the bid is rejected I will use a trick to bid again but increase my bid by $5.  Here is the trick: You'll online travel agent training notice that not every area has 4-star hotels, in fact, many only have 3-star hotels.
Voila, I am now able to bid on 4-star hotels again and since zone 3 does not have any 4-star hotels I know the 4-start hotels are located in downtown only, my desired location.  This trick allows me to make multiple bids on 4-star hotels in the downtown area. If my first bid is rejected I add a zone with no 4-star hotels and increase my bid by $5.  If my next bid is rejected, I combine zone 4 with another zone that does not have any 4-star hotels and once again increase my bid by $5.  I continue this pattern until my bid is accepted or I run out of pairings.  If I run out I then start over in 24 hours.
Much like rental cars the success of bidding online travel agent training on hotels depends on demand.  If you are traveling when hotels online travel agent training are booked to capacity you will not have as much success when there are lots of empty hotel rooms.  But even in a busy time like the summer people were scoring hotels for $80 a night that normally sell for $200 a night, that is quite a savings.  Also like rental cars your leverage is at its best when making last minute bids (i.e. 1-2 weeks before arrival).  Remember, once your bid is accepted to cancel your back up reservation if you have one.  Good luck.
Sorry, if I wasn t clear enough in my post. To get to the map view open up a new browser and go to the hotel search section on Priceline, instead of the name your own price section. After you enter in your destination and dates, and click the search button Priceline will show you a list of hotels. In the top right corner of the screen you should see a small map, click on it. The map will show all the hotels as a little pin icon on the map. As I mentioned before I like to look at 4-star hotels so I will narrow my search by star rating online travel agent training and then click update hotel list and then I will be looking at only the 4-star hotels.
This is such a nice, straightforward explanation of how to use Priceline. I find that a lot of people are afraid to use Priceline online travel agent training because online travel agent training of the uncertainty, but with a bit of research and practice, I can usually predict how much to bid and where I will end up. I wrote up a short example of this for the Old Town Alexandria zone of Washington, DC: