Kremmen

I was pretty sure this would be the Jasper before I booked, as there was mention of the internal courtyard and not many hotels have one. PRICELINE EXPRESS breakdown per night was US$91.00 (listed price) + $16.99 (fees) - $9.10 (10% discount Priceline Coupon) = 98.89. PL claimed 21% saving, which isn't far off. Standard room was about A$150/night (US$116) on the Jasper's web site and other sources. We were upgraded to a courtyard access room, which usually costs about A$60 more.

Having failed to obtain anything at the 4* level for a decent price, tried 3.5* from $48/night, moving up in $2 increments. $52/night was roughly half the price for the same dates on the Hilton web site. Rooms: 1 Nights: 3 Room Subtotal: US$ 156.00 Taxes & Fees: US$ 34.77 Total: US$ 190.77

Every measurement I can think of runs from most significant to least significant unit or vice versa. "Least significant unit in the middle" has never been logical. Even the US customs and immigration forms were all changed over to dd/mm/yy about 10 years ago. It's like the metric system. It's time the USA adapted.

It's a shame it hasn't come far enough to use some kind of logical, unambiguous date format or, ideally, to have configurable date formats. m/d/yy is an illogical format used by in a small proportion of the world. There are many better formats, including yy/m/d (or even d/m/yy) or at least putting all month names as 3-letter text abbreviations rather than numbers.

I'm not in the US and neither is the place I reported on, so I don't see the fact that the web server is in the US as being that relevant. Even the US government realises that nobody else uses the hairbrained mm/dd/yy thing and has used dd/mm/yy on their customs and immigration forms for years. (I remember when the customs form and the I-94 card were different, one using dd/mm/yy and one using mm/dd/yy! Sensibly, they moved both to the more accepted format around 2000.) If you genuinely want to make it easier for everyone, it would be better to standardise on something easy to interpret for all, such as putting an abbreviation for the month (Jan, Feb, etc) or making it some sort of date field which can be configured by users.

Yeah, it's great. The AUD is at about an 18 year high vs. the USD. :) It's supposed to be an interesting city and I'm really looking forward to it, so I'm surprised how inexpensive Berlin accommodation is generally. There are much less interesting parts of Europe, and Germany itself, which are much more expensive. Hey, what happened to my dates? I never enter them in that irritating, illogical mm/dd/yy format.

Tried $65. Failed. Tried $70. Success. Your Offer Price: US$70.00 Number of Rooms: 1 Number of Nights: 2 Subtotal: US$140.00 Taxes and Service Fees: US$31.45 Total Charges: US$171.45

In case anyone's interested in the offers on various sites for the same stay: Priceline: $303 Wotif.com: $398 Lastminute.com.au: $398 Accorhotels.com: $418 Expedia: $418 Travelocity: $422

Failed at US$90, then tried US$100 and was accepted. Gee, Priceline's fees are high now! The real price ends up over A$150/night. (Still a good deal. The Menzies is at A$400 or more for those 2 days on other sites.) Check-In Date: Saturday, October 15, 2005 Check-Out Date: Monday, October 17, 2005 Hotel Name: All Seasons Premier Menzies Your Offer Price: $100.00 Number of Rooms: 1 Number of Nights: 2 Subtotal: $200.00 Taxes and Service Fees: $31.09 Total Charges: $231.09

Tried US$50 on priceline.com and received a counter offer of US$64. It's usually sufficient to raise by 1/3-1/2 the suggested amount, so I tried US$55 and failed. Tried

It was quite good, actually. The staff were pleasant and helpful. The room was an odd, modern design, with the bathroom directly off the bedroom, but the toilet separately in its own little room off the entrance hall. Any extras, such as parking or net access, were extraordinarily expensive, but that's what I expect in London.

Started at US$35 and added $2 with Springfield free re-bid. Your Offer Price: $37.00 Number of Rooms: 1 Number of Nights: 2 Subtotal: $74.00 Taxes & Service Fees: $14.36 Total Charges: $88.36

Another old one, but thought I'd add to the data points here anyhow. Your Offer Price: $50.00 Number of Rooms: 1 Number of Nights: 2 Subtotal: $100.00 Taxes & Service Fees: $19.22 Total Charges: $119.22

Started at US$55, went up by $5 and was accepted. My gf booked a stay in Bristol a few days before this one, and likewise was accepted at US$60, but for the other Marriott in Bristol. Your Offer Price: $60.00 Number of Rooms: 1 Number of Nights: 1 Subtotal: $60.00 Taxes & Service Fees: $17.09 Total Charges: $77.09

Oops. That should be "4*". I started with 3* at $40, but changed to 4* when that failed.

There was no possibility of a rebid in the London Bridge area, so tried US$70 first, then upped it by $10 a few days later. Your Offer Price: $80.00 Number of Rooms: 1 Number of Nights: 2 Subtotal: $160.00 Taxes & Service Fees: $36.09 Total Charges: $196.09 Didn't seem too bad, since the location was what I wanted and the Novotel web site gave prices from over 100 GBP/night.

I did some travelling last year and didn't get around to posting my priceline results. As at least one of them was a property I've not seen mentioned anywhere, I thought I'd post them here now, despite the time lag. Started at US$45, bumped it up by $5 each time. Was accepted at US$55. Your Offer Price: $55.00 Number of Rooms: 1 Number of Nights: 1 Subtotal: $55.00 Taxes & Service Fees: $16.14 Total Charges: $71.14

thesqueegeekid has used a number of different formats in posts on the Canada section, which makes it easy to have a look at how slight variations on your suggestion above looks. Personally, I think the most important aspests are the star rating+location and the price. The posts that have star rating+location+name as title and price+dates as description are best. You can run your eye down the leftmost edge of the topics and see star ratings and prices at a glance, which works best to me. Having to scan across left to right to find price takes a lot longer. What do you think?

I didn't get one of the $10 bonus emails from Priceline, but managed to get from from a friendly Flyertalker on the last day of the offer. Tried $18 first and then added various non-3* zones until I was accepted at US$22. Marriott's web site says C$225/night at same property.

Out of 8cm (on my screen) of wasted space, the "send this page" thing is only 2cm of it. My suggestion would be to align the "send this page" thing left instead of right and put it in the same table as the "add message", etc, buttons that are on the right. Also, the "send this page" thing is pointless on non-message pages, such as the message editing pages, so it doesn't make sense for it to be on them as it is now anyhow. Once all the text from "We have a new name" to "(Adjust Your Bookmarks" is gone, that would get rid of all the white space. Reducing the height of logo3 would save header space.

It's fair enough to have the announcement on the home page, but it doesn't need to be on every page. The "Send this Page to a Friend" button is an inch high and just wastes that height across the whole window. If you really consider it important, surely it could go next to something? Look at Flyertalk for an example of a site that's laid out nicely. When looking at a forum, there is nothing but useful buttons (plus a banner, but it doesn't waste space, since it's next to buttons instead of above or below them) above the messages. Here, there are several small sets of useful links, spaced out by enormous amounts of blank space.

The massive logo and all the unnecessary large text ("We have a NEW NAME!!", " (Adjust Your Bookmarks Now)", "Send this page to a friend", etc) and unnecessary blank space means that headers use up almost the whole window of every page on this board, making it necessary to do lot and lots and lots of scrolling to actually see anything useful. Please get rid of all the extraneous stuff.