If no suggested price, significance?

[WillTravel]

If you go to Priceline.com and prepare a bid for say Florence, Italy you do not get a Suggested Price. If you go to Priceline.com and prepare a bid for Paris, France, you do get a Suggested Price. If you try this with several European cities that are known to have had successful bids, you will see they all have suggested prices when you enter a bid price.

So far in my limited experience, European cities that have never had reported successful bids do not seem to have suggested prices. I tried this with a few cities (Genova, Italy and Gothenburg, Sweden, and Oslo, Norway and Helsinki, Finland all failed to show any Suggested Price), but did not submit any bids. I suspect that you will never succeed with a Priceline bid in these regions, but you will get a lowestfare screen. This is only a hypothesis, however.

I'm not planning another trip at the moment - just wishfully thinking!

Of course if you do see a suggested price, you should probably ignore it no matter what city you are bidding, as Priceline is just giving you some sort of highly inflated rack rate calculated by an algorithm known only to itself.

[WillTravel]

There is definitely something to this.

If you enter Copenhagen as the city, and 1/13/04 as the check-in date and 1/14/04 as the check-out date, you will see suggested prices. If you enter 2/13/04 and 2/14/04 you will not see suggested prices. If you gradually move the dates back, you start seeing suggested prices around the end of January. That means, I think, that no hotels have listed Priceline inventory for the later dates, but they have listed Priceline inventory for the earlier dates. (But enter 12/25/03 and 12/26/03 and you also get no suggested prices.)

Similarly, I tried entering an 8-day period in March for Paris. I don't see any suggested prices for any of the zones I checked. Then I changed it to 1 night, and saw suggested prices. Keep bumping up the number of nights, and eventually you no longer see suggested prices. (I don't think any zone has suggested prices for more than a 7-night stay.)

This is what Priceline says about the listed "Retail Price":

Retail Price

The retail rate displayed is the median of the lowest rates our participating hotels are offering to the general public for the travel dates you selected. These rates are based on the quality level you chose, the city, and the area you selected. These rates are recorded at the time of booking and do not include rates that are restricted to membership programs (such as AAA, AARP), Government rates, negotiated corporate rates, etc.

So if you do not see a Retail Price, I take this to mean there are no participating hotels for the dates you have chosen.

This, again, is just educated guesswork (with emphasis on the "guess").