Priceline Review

I used Priceline recently to book a hotel room for a single overnight stay after a concert I was attending in Oklahoma City.  It worked great.  No hassle whatsoever.  Good rates.  The site was easy to use.  I will totally be using it again in the future.

I loved the different sorting features on the site for hotels. Some were pretty standard.    I could sort by price.  I could sort by quality, etc.  But the one that really was helpful was that the site showed several popular sites in the city that you might want to be close to, and would sort the hotels by distance from that attraction.      Lots of well-chosen things were listed like the airport, convention centers, sports arenas,etc.  The convention center where my concert was was one of the choices.  It was awesome to be able to find so easily which hotels were going to be close to it.  It's annoying when you're traveling to a city you've never been to and end up booking a room way across town from your destination and spend a bunch of time lost and stuck in traffic.  My hotel that I chose was a bit less than 2 miles from the convention center. 

  I wish that there could be a more detailed map system,though. There was an easy to use street map that showed how to get to your hotel, but that was it.  For someone visiting a city I was unfamiliar with I'd like a little more detail.   Some way that it could like mark the hotel on a map, then mark attractions.  That way you could see how they're related. Is it two miles straight shot to the place you're headed from your room or is it two miles from the air, but really an hours worth of stuck in confusing city traffic?  Plus, if you could see what's near the hotel besides your destination, you might make a better decision,too.  Like it's nice to be near a restaurant.  Sometimes I'd like to be close to nightlife.  Sometimes I'd prefer to be someplace out of the way and quiet.  Also, you can tell a lot about what kind of neighborhood a hotel is in by what is around it.  If it's in a nice neighborhood, you can tell by the businesses and such near it.  If it's in the kind of place you're going to be scared to park your car while you sleep, you can tell that,too.  When you're visiting a city you know nothing about, that's a nice thing to know. 

I didn't use the name your own price feature.  I took one of the discount rates offered.  So I didn't have to worry about not knowing what hotel I was getting or anything.  On this particular trip, since I was just staying one night then hurrying home to be at work the next morning, location of the hotel was more important than getting a really low rate on a really nice room.  If I was planning on staying longer, so that drive-time wasn't going to be such an issue or if I didn't have just one specific place in the town I was headed, or if I was staying long enough to enjoy a nicer room, I might have tried it.  But this time, I just took one of their regular discounted rooms.  I stayed at an Econlodge.  Tax and all, I ended up paying just short of 60 bucks for the room.  The rooms were regularly like 80 bucks.  Saving twenty bucks was nice.  Sure, it wasn't the mega deal type savings the commercial makes it sound like.  I wasn't staying at the Ritz for the fifty bucks or anything, but it was a noteable savings over just booking a full price room.  The room I chose was the same or a buck or two cheaper than a couple of other travel sites I checked like Hotels.com.

The room was exactly what it seemed to be on the priceline site.  It had everything the site said it would.  I was the decent, clean, economy class room it seemed to be on the site.  No surprises. 

And there was no hassle booking the room on the site, or when I arrived.  There was only the basic necessary info needed to book the room, which room, what dates, how many people, and only the barest necessary personal info to pay.  Basically name, email, and credit card number.  Not a bunch of intrusive questions aimed at just getting your demographic info for marketing research (or worse, reselling).  Just the info they would actually use to hold your room.  I payed for the room while on the priceline site, then just showed up at the front desk and picked up my key.  No further paperwork or anything.  No hassle.  No questions.  Just given the room I booked. 

Plus their hasn't been any spam associated with it.  The site offers you check boxes to opt out of mailings, and lo and behold, it actually opts you out.  Using some other travel sites causes you to recieve tons of junk email.  Not priceline.  I don't think I've gotten anything as a result of using them.  Not even the "updates" and "specials" type junk mail.  I just made a transaction with them, then they leave me alone until I choose to make another one.  I like that in a business. And it's getting harder and harder to find, especially on the web, these days.

My priceline experience, though maybe not the thrilling negotiation adventure that Shatner makes it seems like, was great and I would likely use them again.