Priceline Hotel: 3* Philadelphia Suburbs (Plymouth Meetng) Marriott

[trvl3]

I started at $39 for 3-star Valley Forge--rejected. Started low because any of the 4 Philly Burbs areas were acceptable for me and one is a free rebid for 3*.

Added Horsham as free rebid for 3*, bid $45--rejected.

Added Norristown, bid $52, still 3*, got Marriott Philadelphia West in West Conshohocken (Norristown area.) I'm happy with hotel, price & location.

[dahammer]

this is a great suburban location, with no traffic, you can be in Philly in about 20 minutes.

[thereuare]

Congratulations on your win and thank you for sharing it with the board.

I think this is a very good deal, but there are better ways to have bid it (if you have a little time on your hands). You could bid each zone invididually at a low price (like the original $39 you had bid) and then use zone combinations as re-bids and to gradutally increase your price. As an example, if this hotel was offered at $39 (i don't think that it is) you never even had a chance to get it at that price.

If you'd like, feel free to ask for help before bidding for your next stay.

Enjoy your upcoming stay.

[trvl3]

Thanks for the offer of help, thereuare, and I was aware that I traded being sure I got the minimum price I could have for saving time in this particular instance. I'm not holding this out as an example of optimal bidding. Your comment that I don't know for sure how much less than $52 I could have gotten this particular hotel for, since my bids of $39 and $45 didn't include the area I won in at $52, is of course valid. I was under some time pressure last night to come up with an exact hotel location to provide to someone else, which affected my bidding.

Actually, though, I was pleasantly surprised to get a 3* for Saturday night only for $52 anywhere in the northern and western Philly Burbs, especially at what I believe to be the best and most expensive hotel in that particlar PL area grouping, and that's why I shared my results. My real expectation this time was that my serious bidding would be at the 2.5* and 2* level, for each of which I would have backed out and started over with individual area bids at $39. I won a quite acceptable 2* in Philly Burbs (Homestead Horsham) for $39 in the past. I'll take more time to get the very best price the lower the quality level I'm having to settle for.

But I understand it's best to start with the highest star bid in an area if you think there's any possibility you'll want to bid at that star level in that area during your session, and I decided that I'd be quite happy to go up to $52 if I could get a 3* rather than a 2*, so I decided to do a quick $39 to $52 3* run to start, just to see if there happened to be a 3* available in that range. For times sake I took the shortcut of saying that the Marriott West, the only known 3* in Plymouth Meeting/Norristown, is a higher priced hotel than any of the three known 3* in Valley Forge, so if my $39 and $45 3* bids for VF were both rejected, as they ended up being, that would mean that PM/N 3* bids at those prices would be rejected too, and so I might as well save adding PM/N for the highest bid I was going to make. But I acknowledge this was a shortcut from the optimal strategy and it may have cost me a little, but I seriously doubt it was more than $2-$4 for my one night.

A question for you, though--after I bid VF 3*, and bid again adding Horsham which has no 3*, I understand that optimal strategy would then have been for me to start over at $39 for 3* bidding PM/N only. But if that failed could I really have gotten a free rebid by adding Horsham (or VF) again? Seems like I have tried that before and found that even if the combination was different, if I had bid for that star level or lower in an area as part of any combination of areas before (within the 72 hrs.) PL would not allow a rebid for adding it. There had to be at least one area in any combo in which there had been either no bid, or only a higher star bid, before a rebid was allowed. Is this true, or did I miss something somewhere?

[thereuare]

A+B

B+C

A+C

All of the above are 'allowed' bids and can be made on the same date without waiting 72 hours.

[trvl3]

thereuare, tried the above on new bidding last night (entry and all re-enties to PL done through the SavingsBarn.com link, as usual.) Where A and B were both areas with hotels in the bidded star level, and C was a free rebid area, I found that after bidding A alone, A+B, and B+C, I was indeed allowed A+C as a free rebid, as you said I would be, even though that was contrary to what I thought I had observed recently.

But although I had not previously bid B by itself, an attempt to bid B alone after I had bid A+B and B+C was disallowed as a duplicate. Although I didn't get that far (my A+C bid was accepted) I think that means that if my A+C hadn't won, I would not have been able to get anther free rebid by doing A+B+C, even though that would have been a new combination, and to get more rebids I would have had to start over with A+D and B+D. Do you agree? If so, I think that was the situation I remember encountering earlier.

[thereuare]

Yes, bidding "B" alone would be a duplicate... your 'new' bids must having something new to them, and not a smaller subset of a previous bid.

[trvl3]

For anyone who may be following the discussion above who was also not sure how this works, I did some more experimentation last night with bids too low to be accepted. I answered my own question from my last post--after bidding A-B, B-C and A-C, you DO get another rebid by bidding A-B-C. And, further, after bidding A-B-C and A-B-D, you get another free rebid for bidding A-B-C-D. And so on.

So what thereuare says above is confirmed to be right on the mark--only a subset (shorter version) of a previous bid is disallowed as a duplicate (as well as the exact same bid, of course.) Explained another way for those who might still be wondering what the implications of this are, as long as you have a new combination of areas, that haven't all appeared together in a previous bid, you'll be given a new bid, no matter how many times you have bid on any or all of those areas at the same star level as part of other combinations