How much would you like to pay per night for a room at a four- or five-star hotel in Seattle? How about $77? Does that seem fair?

Rather hit the Big Apple? We found an $88-per-night bargain at the luxury Roosevelt Hotel.

How about Chicago? Is $84 for a room at the Palmer House Hilton in the Loop reasonable?

For several years, we have plugged away on Priceline’s site and almost always secured rates for high-end hotel rooms far lower than those offered at competing websites.

How much can you save? For that stay in Seattle, where we booked a room at the snazzy Edgewater for $77, other sites—including the hotel’s own site—typically quoted $143 per night; for New York, almost all the other sites quoted $159; and for Chicago, other sites ranged from $101 to $139.

These deals aren’t flukes. We regularly shop for hotel rooms in dozens of major U.S. cities at different times of the year, and almost always get steeply discounted rates from Priceline—both several weeks in advance and the day before the trip.

Priceline’s website gives users two options for searching for hotel rates (and airfares and car-rental rates). One option is similar to Expedia and other online-booking sites: You search an area for a hotel, and Priceline indicates availability and rates for the dates you’ve selected. This option’s per-night rates are generally about the same as those on the other online-booking sites.

Priceline’s Name Your Own Price option, however, is what we used to access extraordinarily low rates. With this option, you enter the city where you will be traveling and the dates for which you will need a hotel room. You then select a neighborhood within your destination city, the minimum star level of hotel, the price you wish to pay—and Priceline notifies you whether or not your offer was accepted.

One major difference between Priceline’s Name Your Own Price and its standard search option—and the search options on most other sites—is that you don’t choose specific hotels. If your price is accepted, you are automatically booked at the hotel Priceline picks for you—and your credit card is charged for the hotel room: no backing out. Also, Name Your Own Price doesn’t let you check rates for several hotels; if your price is accepted by any hotel that meets the conditions you set, that’s where you’re booked. Because you don’t get to choose, Priceline bidding works best if you bid only on four- or five-star hotels—so you can be reasonably sure of ending up at a nice place.

One obvious strategy would be to enter an extremely low rate—say, $20 per night—and if that price isn’t accepted keep raising your bid until it is accepted. But Priceline doesn’t allow this. If your bid is rejected, you’ll have to wait at least 24 hours to rebid at a higher price. And since Priceline tracks its users’ bids not only by credit card numbers but by the billing addresses associated with the credit cards, you can’t game the system by using different cards for each bid.

If Priceline rejects your bid, however, the site does allow you to rebid—under certain conditions. So long as you either expand your search to additional areas in the metropolitan area or add a lower category of hotels according to Priceline’s star-level rating system, you can rebid without waiting 24 hours. It’s this feature that allows you fairly quickly to exploit the site for the best deals.

Below, we take you step-by-step through the system we use. Be aware that it might be confusing to try to follow each step unless you’re at a computer following along on Priceline’s site. Also, don’t be scared off because our strategy involves 12 steps. Once you get the hang of Priceline’s Name Your Own Price, the process of submitting bids and then rebidding takes only a few minutes. Further, we find that we usually have to rebid only two or three times to obtain a great price from Priceline.

The only other site that offers rates anywhere close to Priceline’s is Hotwire, which has a pricing option similar to Priceline’s. With Hotwire, you can either book stays at specific hotels, as you would on any other travel site, or search for a hotel room in a specific neighborhood with a certain star level and select any hotel that meets your search conditions. If you are willing to pay that rate and then book through Hotwire, you won’t find out which hotel you’ve chosen until you’ve paid.

In some scenarios, Priceline’s Name Your Own Price won’t generate lower rates than other sites. For events such as the Super Bowl, the NCAA Final Four, New Orleans’ Jazz Festival, and other spots during times when hotels are already—or expect to be—almost completely booked, you’re very unlikely to find a deal on Priceline. But it’s still worth a shot.

Booking through Priceline does have disadvantages.

First, when naming your own price you can’t specify the hotel where you’d like to stay. This may be a problem if you plan to attend a meeting or wedding taking place at the hotel, or need to stay within a few blocks of the meeting, specific tourist site, sports arena, etc.

Another drawback: You might disagree with Priceline’s hotel-rating system. For example, Priceline gives three or four stars to Crowne Plaza properties; in our experience, that often seems a bit generous. Since you can’t exclude specific hotels from the Priceline bidding process, you might get stuck in a hotel for which a four-star rating is a stretch.

You might also want to avoid booking with Priceline—and other booking sites that require prepayment—if there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll cancel your trip. On the other hand, if you secure a $75-per-night rate and have to cancel, you won’t be out much for short-time bookings.

One last drawback to using any booking site that requires prepayment is that you lose a great deal of leverage if things don’t go right. For example, if you’re assigned a room with a view of a parking garage instead of the ocean, or if the room is small or located in a noisy area of the hotel, you’ll have to count on the benevolence of hotel staff to make things right since you’ve already paid. Indeed, several subscribers who booked through Priceline have complained of being assigned small lower-floor rooms. On the other hand, we book a lot of hotel rooms for our staff and have encountered few of these types of issues. And when we have had problems with room assignments, hotel management has immediately complied with requests to move to better rooms.

A final caveat: Although these price-saving strategies can save you on rooms, you’ll still have to pay the regular rates for other services—such as $43 per night to park at the Hyatt Regency Boston. Similarly, check whether resort fees are included in the prices quoted at Priceline (they should be). And, unfortunately, Priceline has not yet built a Name Your Own Price component for in-hotel meals and minibar goodies.

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