New site features (Jan 2011)
Sunday, January 30th, 2011It’s been a while since we’ve done a blog post, mainly because we’ve been busy writing some new features for the site which we’d like to share with you today. They’ll make it easier for you to get that elusive hotel at a great price.
The first improvement is that in the manual bid path we have begun to collect counteroffer information. A counteroffer occurs when Priceline denies your bid, but then suggests a “one-time opportunity” (one time, sure..) .. you can retry a bid immediately if you raise your offer price to a certain amount. This is called a counteroffer because if you agree to their terms your bid is sure to succeed.
Unfortunately, the counteroffer amount is almost always a significant margin away from the optimal price. Still, it provides useful information because it represents a price that you can be sure you will get a hotel. The information itself has been the subject of some lively debate at Flyertalk.
You’ll notice if you do a bid manually on our site now, you’ll see a screen like this:
Additionally, we’ve begun to surface the information we have for this in the map screen itself.
This will provide invaluable information as to how much you should bid for on your Priceline hotel.
Finally, we’ve extended another feature that has existed for our AutoBid users for quite some time. However, if you’re been bidding manually, you’ve probably had your own share of failed bids where you don’t end up winning. We’re now pleased to offer you the option to get emailed the first time another site user ends up winning a hotel with similar criteria to yours.
