Omaha Cheap Hotels: Finding Amazing Deals on Priceline

Priceline.com is known for its Name Your Own Price service, which lets you bid on hotels. It acts as a third party between you, the bargain shopping customer, and the hotel, which is willing to sell their rooms at deeply discounted rates when they have unsold rooms. The catch to using this service is that you do not know exactly what type of hotel you’ll be staying in. You’ll only know the relative location of your hotel and the amount of stars it has. Thus, if you want to know exactly which Omaha cheap hotels you’ll be getting, this service isn’t for you. Regardless, the discounts users get from this service more than compensate for not knowing what hotel you’ll be staying in. In this article I explain how to get a 3 star hotel for around $50.

There are actually whole forums devoted to the subject of bidding on Priceline. But here is 99% of what you need to know to “beat the system” when looking for bargains:

First, check out betterbidding.com and biddingfortravel.com to see what types of bids were accepted for the Omaha area on Priceline. This will give you a good idea of how to bid for specific star levels. For example, betterbidding tells you that your bid for a 3 star hotel in the Omaha area should be around $45, because that is the typical winning bid for other users. You can check what the standard price for 3 stars by going to hotels.com. A quick look at hotels.com shows me that the general online rate is $100 to $170. Taking this information together, it means that your lowest bid for a 3 star hotel should be around $45 and the highest should be $100. If you bid more than $100 you risk overpaying for a 3 star hotel in the Omaha area.

Go to Priceline.com for the Omaha area. You’ll see that there are 7 zones (Bellevue, Central Omaha, Council Bluffs, Omaha Airport, Omaha Downtown, Southwest Omaha, and West Omaha). For each zone, write down the highest star level within it. You can find this find simply clicking and unclicking on a zone. Here is the info for all the zones:

Bellevue- 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus
Central Omaha- 3-Star Upscale
Council Bluffs- 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus
Omaha Airport- 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus
Omaha Downtown- 3-Star Upscale
Southwest Omaha- 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus
West Omaha- 3-Star Upscale

Keep in mind that there are a total of 4 star levels (1-Star Economy, 2-Star Moderate, 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus, and 3-Star Upscale). Lets assume that you want to stay in Omaha Downtown because it has a good location. You want the best, 3-star upscale. You bid $47 because that is close to other people’s successful bids, published on the aforementioned forums. Priceline Omaha 1 You fill in your personal and credit card information and get rejected. If you listened to Priceline you’d have to wait another 24 hours to bid again. Game over? No! Hit the back button on your web browser to get to the original page where you entered your original $47 bid. Priceline allows you to rebid, but only if you change something (the date of your stay which you probably can’t anyways, your minimum star rating, which you don’t want to change either, or the zone). Remember how we made a list of the top star rating offered in each zone? The zones with the lower star ratings are your “fake” zones, which will allow you to bid again. For example, you can now select, in addition to your Omaha Downtown zone, the Southwest Omaha zone because it has a maximum of a 21⁄2-Star Moderate-Plus star rating, for a total of 2 selected zones, one of which is your dummy. You have now changed the zone criteria (because you’ve added an additional zone)! . You can now bid again for your Omaha downtown zone! Because your required star level is 3-Star Upscale, which the dummy Southwest Omaha zone doesn’t meet, you can be sure that you won’t get stuck with a hotel there. Just make sure that you bid slightly higher, say $48. Priceline Omaha 2 If the $48 bid is rejected, no problem! Click the Priceline logo at the top left of the rejection screen and enter another 2 zone combination. You can now bid a higher price, say $49, using another dummy zone. For example, you can now use a combination of Omaha Airport and Omaha Downtown zone. If that fails again you still can bid two times by using the remaining Bellevue and Council Bluffs dummy zones. Just remember that the closer you get to $100, which we found is the standard rate for 3 star Omaha hotels, the less your discount is going to be. Rebidding using 2 zones is only the beginning, here I explain how to rebid using more than 2 zones, which can you let you rebid 16 times!