Priceline Hotel: What does this message mean?

[sherbstreit]

I was just bidding and after not getting anything at USE 4* I went to try FW 3*. I started to enter in my bid - put a 6 in - a message appeared "based on recent data you have almost no chance of winning" or somthing to that affect. So I erased the 6 and put a 7 and got the same message. Took out the 7 and put an 8 and it appeared. What is that about? Is it thinking I was just going to bid $6 and not add anything else or is it something else going on? I hadn't gotten anything like that before when I was not getting a successful bid.

[sherbstreit]

Oh yeah, I was going to bid starting at $60, then $65. Any other ideas?

[WillTravel]

Priceline has some program in there that triggers at different levels (you can figure out much of it by looking at the source code). Priceline didn't think that you were going to bid $6, but rather sixty-something. This sort of message seems to appear randomly. So I'd just bid whatever you are going to bid, because people have won bids despite getting such messages.

[headtrip]

Since I just did multiple bids on priceline recently, IMHO I think it is simply triggered by typing too slow...that the screen reads your data as you type it and if you are typing too slow, it will just read the 6 or 7 of your bid and the message pops up. Once you change the bid price again, it dissapears.

[thereuare]

Nothing to do with speed of typing... it's all price based. Priceline doesn't read your input as you type, nothing is submitted until you hit a SUBMIT or ENTER.

If you want to test your slowness theory try slowly typing in an absurdly high bid amount and see if they kick it out as too low.

[EdJS]

Nothing to do with speed of typing... it's all price based. Priceline doesn't read your input as you type, nothing is submitted until you hit a SUBMIT or ENTER.

If you want to test your slowness theory try slowly typing in an absurdly high bid amount and see if they kick it out as too low.

Actually, you're wrong. The bidding page has scripts that detect your bid as you are typing. In fact, I did just use your test method and it DID pop up a message saying that it was too low.

Here's specifically: I bid for a 4* in San Francisco. In the box I typed "4", then waited a few seconds. A message appeared on the screen: "Based on recent data, your bid has almost no chance of being accepted." I then typed "5", to make my bid $45, and waited. The message changed to "Based on recent data, your bid has only a small chance of being accepted." Then I typed "5" again, to make my bid $455. The message disappeared.

Try it yourself.

Ed

[thereuare]

I now see what you're refering to and i was refering to something else (i thought you were refering to the screen that appears after clicking the SUBMIT button). The message you are refering to is below the pagefold on my screen and that's why i hadn't seen it previously. Thanks for pointing it out.

I agree that this message is meaningless and the only purpose is to increase Priceline's bottom line.