Priceline Name Your Own Price in 2026 — Gone but Not Forgotten

You just heard someone mention Priceline’s “Name Your Own Price” and thought — wait, can I still bid on hotel rooms? The short answer: no. Priceline killed Name Your Own Price for hotels back in October 2016, and it is not coming back.

But here is what most of the old articles about this do not tell you: the deals that made NYYP such a cult favorite did not just vanish. They migrated into two replacement programs that still deliver 20–40% savings on hotel rooms — you just have to approach them differently than the old bidding system.

What Priceline Changed in 2016

Name Your Own Price let you pick a star rating, a neighborhood, and a price — then Priceline either accepted your bid or told you to try again. I remember refreshing the page on my laptop at 11 PM trying to snag a four-star room in midtown Manhattan for under $90. Sometimes it worked. Most of the time it did not, but when it did, the rush was real.

Priceline shut the whole thing down after acquiring Booking.com. The company pivoted hard toward transparent pricing — real prices, instant booking, no guessing games. From their perspective it made sense. The auction mechanic confused a lot of first-time users and probably cost them conversions. From a traveler’s perspective, though, we lost a genuinely powerful tool for getting hotel rooms below market rate.

What Replaced Name Your Own Price

Two programs fill the gap now, and both lean on the same core idea — you commit to a booking before knowing the exact hotel. The opacity is the tradeoff for the discount.

Express Deals give you a star rating, a general neighborhood, an amenities checklist, and a price. What you do not get: the hotel name or exact address. You pay first, then Priceline tells you where you are staying. Typical savings land between 20–40% below the same hotel’s openly listed rate. Markets like Vegas, Miami Beach, and New York tend to offer the steepest discounts because there is almost always excess hotel inventory in those cities.

Pricebreakers take a slightly different approach. Priceline presents three possible hotels and you book knowing you will end up at one of them — but not which one. The upside is less randomness. You can look up all three hotels beforehand, read reviews, check locations on a map. If any of the three would ruin your trip, you know to skip the deal entirely.

Neither program gives you that old thrill of submitting a bid and watching the timer count down. But the savings are genuine — sometimes even better than NYYP delivered, because Priceline now has access to far more hotel inventory through Booking.com than they ever did during the bidding era.

Can You Still Get the Same Deals Without Bidding?

You can, actually — and there is a method that seasoned travel hackers have been using since the BetterBidding forum days.

The idea is simple cross-referencing. When an Express Deal shows you a 4-star hotel in a specific neighborhood with a pool, fitness center, and restaurant, you take those details and search Google Maps or Booking.com for hotels that match all three criteria in that same area. Most neighborhoods only have a handful of hotels at a given star level, so the list narrows quickly.

A real example from a trip I booked last fall: Priceline had a 4-star Express Deal in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego — pool, spa, complimentary breakfast — for $109 a night. I pulled up Google Maps, searched 4-star hotels in the Gaslamp with those amenities, and only two properties matched. Booked it, and it turned out to be one of them. Saved about $65 per night versus booking the same hotel directly.

This trick is not foolproof. In cities with dozens of similar hotels packed into the same district — looking at you, Orlando — the cross-referencing gets messy. But in mid-size cities or neighborhoods with distinct hotel inventories, it works more often than not.

Rental Cars — Does Bidding Still Work?

Here is the part that surprises people. Priceline still has a version of Name Your Own Price for rental cars in certain markets. You pick the car class, your dates, and your pickup location, then name a price — just like the old hotel system.

It is not available everywhere. Major airport locations tend to have it; smaller cities and off-airport spots usually do not. And Priceline has not exactly published a list of which markets support rental car bidding, so you have to check each time. When it is available, savings can run 30–50% below the openly listed rate.

The catch is seasonal. Summer road trip season and holiday weekends tighten rental inventory across the board, which means fewer accepted bids. If you are booking for a Tuesday-to-Thursday in October, your odds are much better than Fourth of July weekend.

To check: go to Priceline’s rental car page and scroll past the standard results. If a “Name Your Own Price” option appears at the bottom, it is available for your search. If it does not show up, it is simply not offered for that market — there is no hidden workaround.

Is Priceline Worth Using in 2026?

If your priority is paying the lowest possible rate and you are comfortable not knowing the exact hotel until after you book — yes, Priceline still delivers. Express Deals shave 20–30% off standard rates in high-inventory markets, and the cross-referencing method takes enough of the mystery out of the process to make it feel like a smart bet rather than a coin flip.

If you need a specific hotel, want the option to cancel, or are booking something where the hotel itself matters — an anniversary trip, a family reunion — then Priceline’s opaque model is not the right fit. Express Deals are almost always non-refundable. Book through a transparent platform where you see exactly what you are getting before you pay.

Name Your Own Price is gone for good. But the savings it unlocked are still out there, repackaged into Express Deals and Pricebreakers. Spend ten minutes cross-referencing before you commit, and you can still travel for meaningfully less than the published rate. You just do not get to watch Priceline sweat over your lowball offer anymore.