Anyone still use Priceline?

[digamma]

When I was in law school, my wife (then girlfriend) and I were long distance. I had some epic battles with Priceline squeezing out a few extra dollars savings on a plane ticket. Since then, I think I've only attempted to use Priceline a few times and only been successful once.

For me, personally, I've used Priceline less because when I fly has become much more important to me. However, I've also noticed in the few times that I've attempted to use the site unsuccessfully, that it may be harder to get a good deal on Priceline these days. I must admit that recently, I've attempted to use it more for rental cars and/or hotels where the margin for savings may not be as great, and that may contribute to my lack of success. But, with the lack of success, I am not as likely to spend an hour or two fighting with priceline to get them to accept an offer--I would have done this when I was a student--even though now most priceline offers are instantaneous (as opposed to the previous system where they would e-mail you an answer within an hour or some other specified time period.

For no real reason, I'm wondering if others still use priceline, and if they do so successfully. I'm aware of the biddingfortravel web site, and I'm not looking for successful bidding strategies. I'm just curious whether people are still finding deals with the site.

[JonInMiddleGA]

My wife still uses it semi-regularly, I've never been much of a fan of it.
I double-checked with her take on it & she said this was a fair description
"The airfare isn't much to talk about but the hotel bargains have been fantastic"

I'll add that she's probably gotten more hotels thru them in the past 3-6 months than she had booked with them in the past several years. Not sure if that means they've gotten better or not.

[Ksyrup]

I've never used it, simply because I don't have the luxury of coming and going whenever I want.

[molson]

Priceline is fantastic when it comes to hotels. I've gotten hotels in the low $30s in major American cities, and in the high $20s in Winnipeg and Calgary. Same deal as with flights, you don't get to pick the hotel, but you do pick the dates, star rating, and if the city is big enough, the neighborhood.

Catch is, you can only submit a price for a certain day/city/neighborhood once. But there's a trick. In major cities, where you can select 8 or 9 different neighborhoods, there are a huge number of different combinations of neighborhoods you can select for any search (since you can pick more than one). So you can litterally do dozens of searches in a city, changing the neighborhood combination each time, and rasing the price by $1 until you get something.

[Craptacular]

Never used it myself, but my Dad uses it for rental cars all the time. They only use the major rental companies, and you pick the class and times. I would never use it for airlines.