Name Your Own Price experience (Priceline.com)

So, in a previous blog, I mentioned priceline's Name Your Own Price option for flights. I did a little research and eventually decided to try it. It is risky. Technically speaking, once you make “a bid,” you have given them the power. If you make “a bid” and they get a flight ticket that meets your “bid,” then they buy the ticket for you and charge you, and there's no going back. Once you make “a bid,” they might get you a ticket right away, or they technically could wait until the day before your flight or even just an hour before your flight (so there's no way you could make it) and still charge you. They hopefully never do that to people, but technically speaking, that power is in their hands, at least as I understand the Terms of Use and such. Also, once you make “a bid,” you have no power to cancel it.

Now, it may seem a lot like gambling, but I see a difference in the Name Your Own Price option. In gambling, one of you wins at the cost of the other, and the odds are very rarely in your favor. In the Name Your Own Price option, you both can win, and not at the cost of each other. That makes it significantly different, in my current opinion, if you have enough to take the risk and be ok if it fails.

So, I ended up deciding to try out the Name Your Own Price option. They're sneaking in that if they don't like your offer, they make it appear like it wasn't submitted, and give you the option to change it, but you can't change only the price; each time you change the price, you have to either add another day that they can choose from, or allow red-eye flights, or something out of a few other options; if they decide they like the offer enough that you gave, they can freeze your offer, meaning you can't change it anymore, and you just have to wait and keep checking on the status. I believe they will almost always either get you a ticket or consider the “bid” closed/declined (a “no go”) within a day or few, but technically speaking, they don't have to. After my offer had become “frozen,” (in the manner I described earlier) I kept checking my emails and didn't see any from them, but after a day or few, I found out how to check the status on their site and there I found out that my offer had been declined. I also called to confirm that, which turned out to be easy to do.  They apparently don't send you an email like I expected to inform you of their decision, at least in the case of declining your offer”bid.”

So in summary, using priceline's Name Your Own Price option is probably pretty safe, in that they probably will make their decision within a day or so, but you have no guarantee, and the “probably” here is based on just my experience and the experience of someone's report I read about when I tried researching the issue. That's a very small sample size to go off of.