Priceline Hotel: 2* Jessup Fairfield Inn

[MichaelBei]

Jessup is south of Baltimore, between Columbia and BWI Airport. Entered Randallstown, got option of Owings Mills or Jessup. Bid on Owings Mills 2.5* @$32, rejected, $27 for 2* rejected. New bid for $28 for Jessup received an offer to rebid at $35, instead added Owings and got Fairfield in Jessup at $30.

Your Offer Price: $30.00

Number of Rooms: 1

Number of Nights: 2

Subtotal: $60.00

Taxes and Service Fees: $15.12

Total Charges: $75.12

Priceline's fee has become very steep; taxes are $6 (10%) which makes their fee $9.12, or 15%!!

[dahammer]

The fee is actually more, because PL does not pay the hotel the entire bid amount. As an example, I recently bid $56 for a room but the hotel was paid $50.60 for the room, Taxes were $7.08. I figure that the PL fee for this one night was about $13.89; more than a 20% !!

[thereuare]

This fee amounts to about $4.50/nite which seems in line. If your accepted bid was $100/nite, the fee would be more, but not by that much (maybe $6.50/nite?). For the lower accepted bids the fee is a large percentage of the total, for higher bids, not so much the case.

Still the best deal going as $30 (or even $35 when including Priceline's fee) for a name brand hotel is otherwise unheard of.

Thanks for the new hotel to add to the list and enjoy your stay.

PS- nice job bidding :)

[MichaelBei]

Yea, you guys got a point (I am not complaining about the overall cost, for sure) - but I'm just a bit frugal. It's true that it is hard to find much lower than $30 these days, but it is also true that Priceline has been steadily increasing their fee behind the scenes - long gone are the days when you paid a flat $6 fee to Priceline regardless of your bid amount. Since a fair amount of my travel is to smaller cities, I also find that Priceline offers a pretty small percentage savings in many such places, which makes one pay more attention to how much the fees add. I have had many cases where the savings available were less than $10 a night. If I were on the board at Priceline, I would probably have voted for increasing the company take on higher dollar bids, but I would cap the take at some percentage, say 8 or 10%, for lower total bids; to wit, if one is buying a hotel for $40 for one night, then I wouldn't charge the customer more than $3 or $4, but I would charge much more if it were $200 for 5 nights (because it is less noticble to the customer in this case).

:)