Has anyone tried the Priceline name your price option ? It sounds like it would be good if you don't care about departure and arrival times much.

The question I have is how long do you have to wait to see if your offer is accepted ? If I am reading their FAQ correctly it sounds like you get the answer immediately. Am I right ?

I've never used it, as I've never seen the possible savings worth giving up all control over airlines and times. You also are much worse off if you miss your flight and you're on a priceline ticket, as they're going to assume you just wanted to take a later flight.

That being said, if I had a lot of time and a little money, it could be worth it.

There was a good discussion board out there where people posted what they were bidding and what was being getting, I mainly looked at it for the hotels option, but I assume they did flights also. I can try and find it if you're interested.

Matthew

I've done it once. The response is immediate. You'll get booked on Joe-Bob's Fly By Night Airline And Roadkill Removal Service.

Keep that in mind. Bid really, really, low.

I use it for hotels all the time. If you know the areas of town with the nicer hotels, you can specify both the area and the minimum number of "stars." I've stayed at Hyatts and DoubleTrees and such for $50-$70 quite often. Beats paying the same price for Motel 6 by a long shot.

One hint...try areas around convention centers. If there's no major convention in town, there's a zillion empty rooms and they want to fill them at pretty much any price.

Yeah I figure I would get a really bad departure and arrival time but if it's cheap enough it might be worth it.

I've used it once for plane tickets, however without noticing I selected the return date 1 week after my mom needed to be back. That caused quite a bit of problems. She didn't notice until the day she was suppose to return home.

I tried putting in a price about $100 less than other airlines were offering on a $500 flight. I got denied. I don't think it's worth it based on that experience.

That's been my experience, too, when looking at flights. It won't accept anything with a discount large enough to make the gamble worth it.

I fell down the first time I tried to ride a bike. Therefore, I decided that all bike rides would undoubtedly end the same and I never tried again. It's not worth the gamble.

I get what you're saying, but you're coming across with a pretty condescending tone. I've tried name-your-price multiple times, over the span of multiple years, for both on- and off-peak seasons, with both high, and low demand flights. Each time, I'd start with a huge discount, and work my way higher, and higher. By the time something was accepted, there was usually little, to no difference in the price from what I could get directly from discount airline websites.

It's a different story for hotels. Care to guess where I got my hotel, the last time I went to Vegas?

Sorry if it came off as condescending. I was just attempting to point out the silliness of trying something once and then calling it bad if it didn't work out. Obviously that is not the case for you. Please disregard

I have NEVER paid ANYTHING for a hotel in Vegas. Well, not directly, anyway.

Reminds me of the last (actually, first, last, and only) time I stayed in Las Vegas. I was there for a bicycle shop convention (I was part owner of a bike shop in Fairbanks, Alaska) and the room deal was something like $400 for the stay but included $800 worth of "house chips" which couldn't be cashed in but had to be used for gambling. However, anything I won with those chips was real money so I took my $800 play money to the roulette table, put $400 on black and at the same time $400 on red, spun once and pocketed my $800 winnings. That is the sum total of all the gambling I have ever done in my life.

tanstaafl.

Mmm... except you would have received half of your original chips back from that transaction, minus 2/38 of them -- ISTR there are a pair of green 0,00 locations on the wheel, so odds are not 50/50 on red/black. Or perhaps I just remember incorrectly.. it's been a while!

Cheers

No Red and Black pay 2:1, but the odds of getting red or black are less than 1:2 because of those green slots. He still ran the risk of losing all of the chips if the ball landed on green, which is where the casino makes its money.

Right on, Bitt. I had two chances in 38 of losing it all... but odds of nearly 20:1 in my favor left me feeling pretty sanguine.

tanstaafl.

[Dammit, Hogan, I thought I had another first use word, but you beat me to it nine months ago!]

I suppose it wouldn't be rocket science to take the BBS database and go through every message, stripping out all the quotations, compiling a master word list, finding all the words only used by one poster, and sorting the list of posters by "BBS-whack" count. But I wouldn't assume you'd win -- I think Bitt and I both have good game.

Peter

Indubitably.

Edit: Dammit! Dan! *shakes fist*

*starts inserting random words into ancient posts*