Chris Owen Has Just Posted the Following:


Priceline.com is a company and a commercial website that helps users get discounted rates for travel-related needs like airline tickets, car rentals and hotel stays. Priceline is not the direct supplier of these services.# Instead,# Priceline facilitates the buying of travel services by its suppliers to its customers. # In the case of hotels, the simple premise Priceline has us believe is that hotel companies don’t make any money off empty rooms so selling us one for far less is better than nothing at all.# That’s true.# Getting a hotel booked at a deeply discounted rate that adds value to the total price of a trip? # That’s# a bit more tricky.
It has been several years since I last did a Priceline bid for a pre-cruise hotel so I thought I might give it a try for an upcoming trip.# I’ll be sailing on Royal Caribbean‘s Allure of the Seas, departing from Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on Sunday, October 9th covering the CruiseOne/Cruises Inc National Conference for various news outlets.# To get there, I’ll fly from Orlando (MCO) to Fort Lauderdale (FLL) the night before.
Flight arrangements I made directly with Southwest Airlines and had originally booked a flight that arrived at 12:30PM on the day of sailing.# That should have been plenty of time to get to Port Everglades, a 10 minute cab ride away. Coming in the night before is always a good idea though, as a cushion protecting from any unexpected travel delays.# I knew that.# I always did that before we lived in Florida.# So I changed that flight to come in the day before which actually cost $40 less.
Good for me.# I saved some money.# Now where will I stay?
My first stop was Hotels.com, just to get an idea of what prices were running in the area.# $125 to $175 a night was not uncommon for hotels close by the port.# But knowing the layout of Fort Lauderdale pretty well I knew that there are a whole lot of hotels not far from the port.# Off to Priceline I went.
The Priceline site has a lot of tools to help with how we do bidding but there are three variables we are required to define before submitting a bid:
Price
Hotel quality
Hotel Location
Price, to me, is the easy part.# I thought “Well, if I can get a nice hotel for around $50 that is not too far, that will be a good deal”.# I was prepared to go higher but initially, $50 was my magic number.# If I got a hotel for that price and could get from the airport to the hotel then from the hotel to the port relatively easy, that’s a win.
Hotel quality is probably more important to me than it should be for a pre-cruise hotel but my flight got me in town in the early afternoon so there would be some time to enjoy whatever facilities the property had.# That bumped up the hotel requirement and I started by looking for a four-star hotel.# They sell for $150 to $200 a night so I knew odds were not good but the initial bid needs to be the dream bid, the one that if accepted is a huge win.## You never know.
Location is often related to Price and Hotel quality in the real world.# Close to the beach in Florida, for example, is most often a higher priced property than one far away.# Duh.# When we lived in Kansas I would accept that fact and gladly pay more to see the ocean.# Living in Florida, a 40 minute drive from the beach, that’s not as important.
So I started there and entered that $50 bid for a four star hotel by the airport.# Priceline immediately told me I had little chance of that price being accepted but I pursued and bid it that way.# Rejected.# But I can rebid now by changing one of the variables.
I changed
Price:# $50
Hotel quality: 4-stars
Hotel Location: Airport
to
Price:# $50
Hotel quality: 4-stars
Hotel Location: Airport and added Beach locations
Also rejected so I changed to
Price:# $50
Hotel quality: 4-stars, and added 3.5 Stars
Hotel Location: Airport and Beach locations
Again, rejected
Not wanting to give up my lovely hotel or price, I changed to
Price:# $50
Hotel quality: 4-stars, 3.5 Stars
Hotel Location: Airport , Beach locations and added Airport-North
Still rejected. At this point I could have added another location but a few dollars more in the area I had already chosen and the quality of hotel I wanted might be worth it (well that and I don’t handle rejection well) so I changed to
Price:# bumped up to $55
Hotel quality: 4-stars, 3.5 Stars
Hotel Location: Airport,# Beach locations and Airport-North
Accepted and I got the Fort Lauderdale Marriott North, a nice hotel with good amenities.# Booking that hotel directly with Marriott at their lowest, non-refundable rate would have been a total with taxes and fees of $132.09.# My price from Priceline with taxes and fees $63.23, less than half.

I paused momentarily to pat myself on the back.
The whole process took about half an hour. Considering the $40 savings I had on the flight by coming in a day early, the hotel really only cost me $23.23.# Thats a great price for a 4-star hotel so I paused again momentarily to pat myself on the back.
Right about now is probably a good time to mention “value” in this equation and that thing about “Getting a hotel booked at a deeply discounted rate that adds value to the total price of a trip” mentioned earlier.
What had I done so far?# Let’s review:

  • I was flying in the day of sailing,# scheduled to land at 12:30PM which would have put me on the ship about an hour later.# That probably would have worked out but did not allow much time for any kind of delay.
  • I changed the flight and booked a hotel that cost me $23.23 … so well worth the price for the peace of mind I would get out of it.

But I still had to get from the airport to the hotel then from the hotel to Port Everglades in the morning.# Had I stayed at a closer hotel, a quick cab ride for either transfer would have worked just fine.# But how would it work for this hotel a bit to the north?# To find out I needed to know how much a cab ride might cost.
Googling “cab fares AND Fort Lauderdale” I came up with multiple sources.# The one that worked was (oddly) Bing Maps which gave me the results:































$42.61 from the airport to the hotel, $34.33 from the hotel to Port Everglades, $76.94 total transfer price.# Add that on to my $23.23 hotel room and we’re up to $100.17 for the trip.# Still far less than a closer $150 beach hotel with $25 cab rides either way but were there other alternatives?
We’ll get into that on part two of this Pre-Cruise Hotel report as we explore ground transportation options, a whole other topic with even more variables than a Priceline Bid.
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