Bidding on Priceline for Hawaii Vacations

A user from emailed me to ask me if I thought she could save money bidding at priceline on her Hawaii vacation:

We will go for 2 weeks.
Fare is $AUS 1100. each return Economy. Sydney to Honolulu.
All vehicle airport transfers.
All Flights within islands to access Hotels.
Insurance is $AUS 382.00 each

Accom:
Wailea Beach Marriott Maui, 5 nites Ocean View room
Hilton Kauai Beach resort 4 nites Ocean View room
Moana Surf Rider Westin Resort 4 nites Ocean View Room

Total cost accom, $AUS 3813.00 each
Total costs for 2 $AUS 10591.20

Would we save much using Priceline?

and I wrote back:
oooooh, thank you , I love seeing this. I LOVE your choice of hotel rooms. The Wailea Beach Marriott is fun. all your hotels are awesome.

Here’s the thing about priceline – for your hotels, you can’t pick them, you can just pick a star level and an area. You have mostly resorts, so that’s fairly easy. You could pick a resort and an area and name half of what you are paying here, and maybe it would get accepted at some hotel that priceline considers equal in status to these ones. If not, you could name 75% of and maybe it would get accepted – there’s a really good chance that you could save money, but you may (probably) will not get the exact hotels you want.

For your airline tickets, it’s a little better deal, because you probably don’t care as much which airline you fly on – so you pick your dates and name your price as half of what you have been quoted here and see what happens. If your bid does not get accepted, you bid up according to the rules and one of two things happens, either you get an offer accepted that is lower than this quote or you don’t. Either way, at least you know you are getting the best deal possible.

Did you book yet?

*** next email

oh, sorry, I just saw that priceline doesn’t offer flights from Australia. So all my info about the airlines doesn’t apply to you.

If you look here at the bidding for travel maui forum you’ll see that the wailea beach marriott has recently accepted a bid as low as $95, however, that is probably not an ocean view room.

It appears you are averaging $248 USD per night for your hotel rooms, so yeah, you could probably save some money, but you can’t choose your hotel, and you can’t choose an oceanview room at priceline.