:) My wife and I placed a bid for a SUV through priceline's "name your own price" service about two weeks ago. We were renting from Philadelphia International Airport from 8/23/06 till 8/28/06. Our bid of $40 for a SUV car class was accepted by Alamo. Priceline never differntiates between what types of SUV's you are bidding for on their site so you never know what you're going to get when you get to the rental counter. According to priceline our bid was accepted for an SUV. When my wife got to the rental car counter, Alamo charged her an extra 14.99 per day plus tax above and beyond the prepaid price through priceline because they claimed they were giving her an "upgrade" to a bigger SUV. My wife did ask for a bigger SUV than what they said they had reserved for her under priceline's service as we were four adults and two children traveling to Virginia. My beef with Alamo and Priceline is that Priceline never discloses to you that you may have to pay extra for the same car class under priceline's own car classification system (i.e according to the info on the bidding page, an SUV is an SUV and you should be entittled to any SUV in the lot under the prepaid price). Priceline's bidding page and website I believe is misleading. You could get your price accepted for an SUV and then have the rental car company partner turn around and charge you under a technicality that was never disclosed on the priceline site. I think Alamo's practices are shady at best. My attempts to get the refund for the extra 92 plus dollars that my wife paid were unsucessful. Customer service at priceline refused to take responsibility for the misleading information on their website (on the bid accepted page). You think you can get any SUV in that class according to Priceline's car category system, but you can't. According to their rating system, a change in car class would have been for a van, minivan or convertible and not to another type of SUV. I will not use priceline again for an SUV rental. I hope this information helps other people when consideriong a car rental bid on priceline. You never know what type of SUV is reserved for you and it is totally up to the discretion of the car rental partner to charge you extra if they feel like. You have no recourse. Priceline was totally inadaquate in investingating my claim about the extra money paid out. They refuse to let you speak to a supervisor and totally sided with the shady operations of their rental car partner, Alamo (at least in my case). To know what type of SUV you're going to get, you should try another site such as carrentals.com.
