Priceline Hotel: Help with London Bid

[TravelForLess]

Hi all,

I'm trying to bid for a 4* hotel in London for November 9 and 10. I saw that there were a few wins around that time. I saw a winning bid of $83 for Hilton Hyde around those dates. However, in my bid, I was unable to win even when I bid upto $90. I use the bidding strategy posted on this forum as London has many zones.

Has the price increase recently or am I bidding to late (too close to the actual date)? Thank you for the help.

[thereuare]

Please follow-up your previous Priceline Hong Kong thread with whatever you ended up doing for that stay.

Then reply to this thread with which zone(s) you have included in your bidding at the 4* level up to $90 and we'll have a look at your dates.

Please use the PRICELINE and HOTWIRE links on the board to begin your travel purchases.

[vanpoodle]

I managed to get weekend nights Nov 4/5 and 10/12 for $83-$84 but got nothing for Mon?Tues/Wed going up as high as $145 or so for 4* and $170s for 5 star. I ended up using the PL maps and seeing that there was a lone outlier in zone 2 (meaning a ways out of Central London) in Chelsea for quite a bit less, so focussed my attention on Chelsea and got it for $120 a night. It's in the boonies but it made sense since I was booking 4 rooms and the $ really added up. I think the Thursday night might have cheaper rates (my $83 bid in Notting Hill was for 3 nights starting on the Thursday), but that Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday are a real problem if you're open to splitting up your stay. WTM (a massive conference with 30,000 to 40,000 attendees) ends on Thursday.

I suggest looking at the map app for PL and see where you happen to see lower rates and focus on that area as well. If you don't have access to that, let me know and I'll take a look and see if I find any hints for where a better rate might be.

[TravelForLess]

Thank you for your help. I will apply your suggestion and see what happens. I did not know that there was a conference going on!

[vanpoodle]

I took a quick look using the map app and both nights are coming in expensive on PL's retail side, $300 at a minumum for a 4* in Central London, and even the cheap Millenium Copthorne out in the western fringes of Chelsea is showing no availability there. The Hilton Hyde Park is showing a retail of $317 for both nights, as are the two hotels they tend to use in the Islington area which are generally cheaper (alas, with good reason....). My inclination would be to inch up slowly on the bids in your preferred area, use smilingboy's re-bid matrix (added to the Forum on Sept 7, 2008) in the re-bidding permutations area because you can squeeze out 30+ bids a session using it. Sometimes rooms come available at the last minute at a good discount as well. Who knows with this conference, I spoke to someone in the hotel biz who happened to be going to it and his thoughts were that perhaps that strategy might work though he highly doubted it, but that it is so huge that finding rooms at a low price is tough, which is what led me to take the Chelsea hotel instead of waiting. The 3* Copthorne Tara is showing $172 a night on the Thursday (which is quite high) and no room on the Wednesday -- it is generally an undesired hotel on this board and is a good barometer of what is going on in London! If you want a 4* rather than dropping to a 3*, you might also consider trying Docklands -- it's a bit of a ways out but the hotels there are quite new.