Priceline has released their 6th annual list of Top 50 New Year's Destinations for 2009!

Based on Name Your Own Price booking requests made by more than 30,000 Priceline customers, Las Vegas tops the list for the 5th year in a row, followed by...

We recently added a list of the "Top 5 Priceline Hotel Queries" to the BidLessTravel homepage!

Well, what are the top destinations (U.S. States) for which people are searching, you ask?

The top 5 queries of our 'Priceline Bid Database' are ...*drum roll please*

We have a lot of new features in development that should make adding your Priceline hotel bids to the winning bid database even easier than it already is, namely:

• When you select a state, a dropdown field is populated with all the cities for that respective state.
• Changing the 'Zone' field to be a dropdown that is populated with all the zones for that city.
• Once you select the zone(s), a list of hotels will appear for selection.

These changes will not only speed up the entry process by reducing how much you have to type, but will also provide for more consistent entries being stored in the database, allowing us to manipulate the data in many, many more ways than we are now (e.g., calendar views, Google maps of Priceline hotels and member bids, etc).

In the interim, however, we have created a new feature to make adding your Priceline hotel bids to the database even easier....

We've all seen those Orbitz Low Fare Guarantee! commercials where a guy flies in on a hovercraft and informs a group of golfers that the price of the hotel they booked on Orbitz went down, so they are all getting checks for the difference. Well, all were issued checks except for the poor schmuck who didn't book on Orbitz.

He must not have placed a Priceline bid for the hotel, either, or William Shatner would have jumped out the back of a van and cut him a check, too.

Priceline also has a "Best Price Guarantee" policy, but few know about it!

According to the Priceline rules...

As most of you know, or will soon discover, Priceline allows you to make "one request for the same itinerary in any 24-hour period." If your initial bid is rejected, Priceline forces you to change one of the following details to immediately rebid without the mandatory 24-hour wait:

• Your check-in date
• Your check-out date
• The zone/area
• The hotel quality/star level

Merely increasing your bid (without changing any other details) does not constitute a change in the eyes of Priceline and their partners. Therefore, it is imperative that you formulate your hotel bidding strategy before you haphazardly fire off your first bid!

The very first step we take when developing our Priceline bidding strategy is...

In our haste (reads: two months) to develop a new site blog, it seems that we've (I know, I know, there's no "I" in "we") overlooked an important component of blogging: comments!

There are a few "off-the-shelf" solutions we could use to get a full-fledged comment system up and running; however, I am starting to think that we would be well-served creating our own comment system that fully integrates with the BidLessTravel community, insofar as the comments display your profile avatar, links to your community profile, allows you to subscribe to receive subsequent comments, etc, etc...

"Resistance is, and always has been, futile."

Since its inception, BidLessTravel has never had a blog.

And though I put up a valiant fight, my futile attempt to resist adding a blog to the site was clearly for naught. I have succumbed to the pressure and, well, here I am, for better or for worse, blogging!