Getting what you want with Priceline – Name Your Own Price

I learned about this trick from a recent post on Rapid Travel Chai. I tried the trick out myself, and it works, but all credit goes back to RTC! 

Sometimes when you’re using Priceline – Name Your Own Price, you play this awful game of “let’s try $100… Ok, $101… $102…” It’s very long and anxiety inducing. RTC wrote about a trick where you can use a prepaid credit card with a low balance (like $5), and use that for your bidding (you want to keep a small amount of money on it for the preauthorization when you submit your bid).

If your bid is denied, you will get the usual denial message:

If your bid would be approved, the Priceline system will try to charge your card. As your prepaid credit card does not have a sufficient balance to pay for the reservation, it will give you an error message, and an opportunity to put in a different credit card number. Once a proper number is put in, your bid will be approved:

With this trick, you can have better control on Priceline – Name Your Own Price bidding!