Best bid time?

[mrgijon]

Are new lots of rooms made available by hotels thru priceline likely to appear at certain times of the day?

For example, if bidding for a hotel room in western europe, is it more likely that room available inventory would increase at 9am or 5pm their time? Or an increase in inventory likely occur on a certain day(s) of the week?

On a recent bid, priceline advised me that it would take them at least 15 minutes to get a reply to my bid since they had to "search" various hotels in the zones I had bid. Does that mean they must contact a live person at each hotel to see if my bid is acceptable?

[thereuare]

There is no set time for when inventory is released or prices raised/lowered.

Priceline's current system of letting you know in about 2 minutes or less is farily new (8 months?) and previously it took 15 minutes to hear back from them. Sometimes the new system doesn't work as smoothly as possible (this could be to a variety of reasons: one of their servers down, a server rebooting, a delay in getting your credit card approved by the issuer, increased requests by Priceline users, etc, etc) and when that happens it simply reverts back to the old system of waiting 15 minutes.

The enitre system is automated and if there is a delay in any step of the process, you'll get the 15 minute message. They're NOT contacting the hotels individually.