Strange workings of Priceline

[Guest]

Thanks to Hooboy and his recommendation of biddingfortravel.com, I just made a successful priceline bid--and a good sucess it was! :-) I'll be staying at the Hyatt Regency/SFO airport for $36 + $6 fee. What baffles me a bit is that priceline seemed to do the opposite of what hotwire does. While hotwire tends to exaggerate the ratings of their hotels a bit, priceline announced the Hyatt Regency as a 3*, but when I checked my AAA tourbook, I found AAA rated it 4-Diamonds. As a relative newcomer to priceline (perhaps a convert from hotwire?), I'm a little puzzled as to why they would underrate. Have you regular priceline users found this to be a common situation? The only reason I could come up with would be that there aren't other 4* hotels in the SFO area, so listing a 4* possibility would automatically give away which hotel it was. Am I on the mark here?

[Michael]

I'm not familiar with how AAA rates hotels but, if you had asked me, I would probably have guessed 3 stars for the airport Hyatt.

 

$36 a night is pretty damn good, but I hope you realise that you are almost 20 miles from downtown San Francisco so, unless you are just going to sit in your hotel out at the airport, you really do have to factor in the cost of a rental car and parking in the city as well.

[Guest]

Actually, I'm leaving, not coming to SF. I like to stay at a hotel near the airport overnight when my flight leaves before 11:30 AM or so, because otherwise I worry about getting stuck in rush hour traffic (I have to drive through SF to get to SFO).

[Michael]

OK, that makes sense.

 

If you can actually get airport hotels *that* cheaply I might do that myself sometime.

Usually I just try to avoid taking morning flights out of SFO, but that tends to mean arriving very late if you are travelling to the east coast.