Do hotels reprice express deals due to bidding?

[WilliamK]

I've notice this pattern a couple times now, I see a Priceline Express Deal, then try and bid amounts up to right below that rate, having failed, I return to try and take the Priceline Express deal and now they've raised the price a bit, e.g. from $267 to $273 per night.  Has anyone else noticed this?  Is this just the hotel doing this (both of my occurrences were for the same 4* hotel).

[thereuare]

The two are unrelated.

Without getting too technical...

It would take a LOT of processing power, time, and slower queries if booking agencies got booking rates 'on demand' each time a search was run. So they download rate data in batches every few hours (let's say every 4-6 hours) and store it on their own servers. When a search is done this enables them to get rates from their own server (which is fast and efficient) rather then fetching a query (which is slower and uses bandwidth, which can get expensive). When you click the button to start the booking process the pricing is checked to make sure it is still valid (ie- hasn't changed in the last 4 hours since the last rate data was retrieved)... this is why you may also see rates move in the other direction and you're given a message 'we can now offer this hotel at a lower rate'.

Hope the above makes sense and explained in a non-technical matter.

Please use the PRICELINE and HOTWIRE links on the board to begin your travel purchases... or thru our sister site MAPS and HOTELS.com for your regular rate purchases.

[cfinley01]

I have found with Hotwire that if I leave the site and return, sometimes the rate go up a few dollars to a lot of dollars. I suspect they sometimes raise the rate if they think they have you.

[Penelope2004]

I have found that if my husband and I both do the same exact search the prices will be a little different.  This has happened on both Hotwire and Priceline.  I always make sure to click through to the site from here, search, but make sure to leave directly to any competitor for a while.  I come back here, click through, and sometimes the prices are lower.   In the same day, or if I wait a day.  Maybe it is what time of day I try, but I've had good luck this way.  I have decided to NEVER take their "offered price" on Priceline (if you bid and lose, then they come back with "if you are willing to up your bid to "x" amount..." because you tell them with your behavior that they can get you to up your price.  They will know who you are, because you have already given them information such as your phone number and email/name.  There is so much information culling online that they must somehow develop a bidding profile/acceptance profile on users.

[thereuare]

By design HOTWIRE prices fluctuate a little from one search to the next... with PRICELINE EXPRESS you usually won't see any change but may see a $1 difference from time to time do to rounding or other circumstances (bigger rate jumps are on account of a change in hotel price since the time you last searched)

... but the original question was if the PRICELINE EXPRESS rates change if you had previously make a failed bid on PRICELINE, and in this regard they do not.

Please use the PRICELINE and HOTWIRE links on the board to begin your travel purchases... or thru our sister site MAPS and HOTELS.com for your regular rate purchases.

[AEmgee]

I have seen wildly fluctuant prices with PRICELINE EXPRESS when performing the same search consecutively on the same computer, within minutes of each other.  For example, most recently Hong Kong Airport 4.5* was $124, $136, and $221.  This is for the same search!