scoring hotel deals: hacking priceline

Like most people, I love to travel. There’s something exhilarating about seeing new places, trying new food, experiencing new cultures, and making new memories in a foreign environment. But there’s one part of traveling that always irritates me. You spend most of your money on the place where you have the fewest number of unique experiences – the hotel room.

So I’m always out to find hotel deals that will enable my budget to focus more on experiences and less on where I sleep every night. And I’ve found a secret weapon in finding cheap hotel deals – Priceline Express Deals.

For those unfamiliar with Express Deals, Priceline will offer a variety of hotels at a substantial discount from what they normally cost. The catch? You don’t know what hotel you’re getting.

Until now.

You see, there’s a way to “hack” Priceline (technically, you’re not hacking anything; you’re just using the information on their site in a way they don’t intend you to). We’re able to do this because Priceline gives you three very important pieces of information: the hotel’s star rating, the hotel’s general location, and the hotel’s average customer review score. Using these pieces of information you can reverse-engineer many of the Express Deals hotels.

Let’s use Atlanta as an example. If you wanted to book a 5-Star hotel in Atlanta on May 8, you would have six possibilities on their regular site (not yet looking at the Express Deals).

1. The Ritz Carlton Buckhead – located in Buckhead; 9.0 review score; $489/night
2. The Intercontinental Buckhead – located in Buckhead; 8.9 review score; $179/night
3. The Four Seasons Atlanta – located in Midtown; 8.9 review score; $480/night
4. The Mandarin Oriental Atlanta – located in Buckhead; 9.9 review score; $495/night
5. The Ritz Carlton Atlanta – located in Downtown; 9.0 review score; $269/night
6. The St. Regis Atlanta.  – located in Buckhead; 10 review score; $495/night

 

The below screenshot shows the first three from the above list:

Now let’s look at the Express Deals. Here we have only two 5-Star options in Atlanta for those dates:

1. Option 1: located in Buckhead; 8/10 review score.
2. Option 2: located in Midtown; 8/10 review score.

 

Now here’s the trick – Priceline rounds down review scores on the Express Deals. So even if a hotel has an 8.9 average review on Priceline, the Express Deals will only show that hotel as having an 8/10 score.

Using this data, we can now conclude which hotels we are looking at in the Express Deals.

Option 1 is the Intercontinental Buckhead since it is the only hotel that we saw earlier that had a score in the 8s (an 8.9 average) and was located in Buckhead.

Option 2 is the Four Seasons Midtown since it is the only hotel that we saw earlier than had a score in the 8s (an 8.9 average) and was located in Midtown.

By using this little trick, you can save $61 on the Intercontinental Buckhead and $39 on the Four Seasons Atlanta. In fact, the $61 reduction on the Intercontinental represents a whopping 34% cost-savings, just for spending a minute comparing some of the options on Priceline.

I’ve used this trick over the years to save hundreds of dollars on travel. There are obviously other ways to save money on lodging, but if you’re looking to stay in a hotel, there are few options more convenient that offer big savings than Priceline Express Deals.