I am not sure that you can guarantee a room through Priceline for that many people....like you can't specify how many beds. Am I wrong?

And, you can't bid on a specific hotel, correct? Only a star level.

I don't use it. I don't like the idea of someone else picking the location of my hotel and also taking my money with no cancellation.

I have been very sucessful with Priceline in the past too, mostly due to a bunch of research on biddingfortravel.com, however I have not used PL for my Sept trip to San Fransisco. Priceline cannot guarentee more than double occupancy in the city and we will be traveling with kids too.

I use Hotwire when traveling with our kids because you can search for higher occupancy, and I use the website betterbidding.com for the research. Whatever you do, use the above sites to see what others are getting on Priceline and Hotwire.

For what it's worth, I used Last Minute Travel for my upcoming trip and found some great deals - it is an opaque site like Hotwire, but pretty easy to figure out which hotel you will be purchasing and unlike Priceline and Hotwire it is cancelable with a small fee.

Yes with Priceline they do not guarantee 2 fulls in your room.

I recently won The Westin St. Francis for 70 a night. Im very pumped about this but Parking is 50 a night. lol

After reading some review of Princeline cust it looks like i will be put in a shoebox room :( like all the other Priceline winners.

Thank you for all your comments. I did Priceline for our trip to New York City last week. This was my first Priceline exp, though I've used Hotwire before. Maybe it was a fluke but our experience was AMAZING. First, I was able to determine which hotel we were getting, because we were staying in Jersey City across the Hudson. There was only one 3.5 star hotel that PL uses in JC. Can't recall how I determined that but it ended up being obvious. Then, I booked 2 rooms for $75 a night so the 4 of us stayed very comfortably for $150 night, compared to $275 in a small room in the city. Then, the hotel was MORE THAN GENEROUS in giving us gorgeous adjoining rooms with a fantastic view of the Hudson and Statue of Liberty. So, all in all, I was very impressed. Now, that may say more about the hotel itself than PL. I don't know. But it sure left us feeling great about it. So, that said, I was hoping someone else could say something like, "yeah, if you only request a 4 star in the Embarcadaro area then you will be bidding on a blah, blah, blah." Then, I can check the reviews for the blah, blah, blah hotel to know if I want to stay there regardless of the cost. Does this make sense? Maybe with a city the size of SF it's not possible to do that. However, I will definitely check out those sites recommended above and see if that helps me with my process. You all are wonderful, as always.

I've read here that PL users will call the hotel they got and make a request for a room type. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not.

The St. Francis is one of those hotels with an old building and a new tower. I don't believe I've heard of anyone using PL and getting a tower room. The rooms in the older building aren't standard sized, some are small, others aren't. Again, asking nicely before you get there and again when you check in can't hurt.

Try this. Go to hotelres.com. This is a consolidator for San Francisco hotels.

Put in your dates and the area of the city you want to stay in, probably either Union Square (or Fisherman's Wharf, because of the kids.)

It will return a list of hotels with the location, facilities, and amenities.

If you find some you like, come back here and we can help you with more information on location, etc.

I have a reservation for the Adagio in June for $105, including parking (unbelievable!) through them. This hotel is in the theater district, a little over two blocks from Union Square. We know it because we often eat in its restaurant. Have not stayed there yet, but the reviews are good.

When I checked the prices on Hotline, etc. the cheapest rate for this hotel was $139, plus parking.

We live 70 miles from the city and visit often for theater, etc. I usually use hotelres.

Have used Priceline several times in SF and elsewhere and have always gotten excellent quality rooms for about 1/3 to 1/2 the going rate.

However, you cannot gaurantee a room for more than two people in SF on Priceline.

Check Biddingfortravel.com

-:- Message from TripAdvisor staff -:-

This topic was inactive for 6 months and has been closed to new posts. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one.

To review the TripAdvisor Forums Posting Guidelines, please follow this link: http://www.tripadvisor.com/pages/forums_posting_guidelines.html

We remove posts that do not follow our posting guidelines, and we reserve the right to remove any post for any reason.