Priceline Express Deals Hotel Name Before Booking
While Priceline isn’t always the best way to save money, it is often a good way. For me, one of the biggest frustrations with their Express Deals is that you don’t get to know exactly which hotel you are booking. In some areas this isn’t a huge deal, but in larger cities the difference from one property to another can be significant.
For those who aren’t familiar, Express deals are hotel rates that require no bidding. Before you book you can see the price, amenities, neighborhood and star level, but not the hotel name. You can actually save a lot of money with these deals and they can be worth looking at, especially if you don’t care about points accrual or elite credit.
Of course my one reservation is not knowing the name, but fortunately that limitation seems to be a thing of the past. Today I stumbled upon two different ways to solve that problem!
Option 1 – iPhone App ExpDeals
I found out about this app today from MilesQuest who has a full write up with screenshots. The app is free today (I’m not sure the normal price) and it works quite simply. Search for a city on specific dates and it will show you the name of the hotel that Priceline is keping a secret! YAY!
Option 2 – Hotel Canary Chrome Extension
I learned about this in the comments of the MilesQuest post. It aims to do the same exact thing, but of course doesn’t require an iPhone. The reviews are a bit mixed, so there is no way to know if it will be 100%, but at least it could give you a better shot of knowing.
Other Ways & Your Experiences?
Finding these two ways that I had never heard about got me thinking that surely there are more apps/solutions that I don’t know about for Priceline and other services. Feel free to share your experiences with these two apps and any other apps that you know about that provide similar information!
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There is a free website that can also do this:
http://www.hotelrevealer.com
I tried it several times and overall works out fine
What about hotrate hotel in hotwire?
I’m not sure if there are similar services. Hopefully someone can share their experiences.
Hotwire plays much looser with the hotel star system. Priceline is very strict about what is and what is not a 4-star hotel, etc. But a 4-star hotel on Hotwire might only be a 3-star on Priceline. That isn’t to say that Hotwire is bad, just that the rating might be sketchy.
I have a pretty decent system for working out the express deals on Priceline. Used it constantly in the US for 18 months of travel and was only wrong once at the very beginning when I didn’t know 100% what I was doing. It’s just some basic math + detective work! I’ve detailed the process on my blog if you want to read it – flashpackerfamily.com/using-priceline-express-deals/
Great! Thanks for sharing your insight.
One humorous thing about the iPhone app is that the splash screen suggests that you try a search for ‘Las Vegas or NYC’, but then the app didn’t understand “NYC” when I input it…you need to input “New York City.”
I haven’t had occasion yet to try them out in the real world, but I plan to the next time I need to pay for lodging in one of their covered cities. Kudos to the authors!
I’ve never used Express Deals, but I do like bidding for hotels on priceline. And before bidding I look at the often maligned biddingfortravel.com to see what others have paid, to establish a bidding strategy, and to determine the likely hotel I’ll get for a certain category / location.
Next time try betterbidding.com
Sometimes it is very useful.
Yes I have definitely used that site in the past before bidding. Thanks for the reminder.
The reviews aren’t good for that Hotel Chrome Canary extension. Have a read.
Yes as I said in the post they are mixed. Some are good and some bad. I was offering it as an alternate solution since the app is iPhone only. All of these tools are simply guessing based on available data and I don’t believe any solution will be 100%.