Is Priceline Name Your Own Price Still Available in 2026?

Priceline Name Your Own Price — if you’re searching for it right now, you’ve probably hit a wall of blog posts from 2016 and 2017 that don’t actually tell you whether the feature still exists. Here’s the direct answer: for hotels, it does not. Priceline killed the hotel bidding tool in October 2016, and it has not come back. But the story is more complicated than that, and the deals that made Name Your Own Price worth using? Those are still quietly available — just through a different mechanism. This article explains what happened, what replaced it, and whether Priceline is still worth your time in 2026.

The Short Answer — What Priceline Changed in 2016

Priceline launched Name Your Own Price (NYYP) back in 1998. The concept was genuinely weird for its time: you submit a bid for a hotel room in a city, and Priceline goes out and tries to match you with a hotel willing to accept that price. You didn’t know which hotel you were getting until after your credit card was charged. No cancellations. No refunds. You were committed the moment you submitted.

For years, this was the best deal in online travel. I used it regularly through the early 2010s and consistently landed 4-star hotels in cities like Chicago and San Francisco for $60 to $80 a night — rooms that would have run $150 to $200 booked directly. The opacity was the price of admission. You might end up at the Hyatt Regency or you might end up at a Hilton that’s technically 4-star but clearly past its prime. That was the gamble.

Priceline discontinued the hotel bidding tool in October 2016. The timing lined up directly with Priceline Group’s full integration of Booking.com into its core strategy. Booking.com operates on transparent pricing with a massive inventory of independent hotels, and the NYYP model was philosophically incompatible with that direction. Hotels also increasingly disliked it — the opaque pricing made it harder for them to manage their brand and rate parity agreements.

So they shut it down. No fanfare. The bidding page just stopped appearing.

One important caveat before we move on: Name Your Own Price for rental cars was not discontinued at the same time. More on that in a later section, because it works differently and the availability is patchier than most guides acknowledge.

What Replaced Name Your Own Price

Priceline replaced NYYP with two products that preserve the opacity model while removing the actual bidding component. These are Express Deals and Pricebreakers. They are not the same experience — but they deliver comparable savings if you use them correctly.

Express Deals

Express Deals show you a discounted rate on a hotel where the hotel name is hidden until after you book. You can see the star rating, the neighborhood, the amenity list (pool, breakfast, free parking), and guest review score. You cannot see the name or photos until the booking is confirmed.

Savings typically run 20% to 40% off what you’d pay booking the same room directly or on Expedia. In practice, I’ve seen Express Deals for $89 a night in New York City neighborhoods that matched up to hotels running $140 to $160 on Google Hotels the same night. The inventory is real — these aren’t distressed rooms or obscure properties.

The catch is the same as it always was with NYYP: no cancellations, no modifications. You’re locked in. If your plans change, you’re out the money.

Pricebreakers

Pricebreakers are a slightly different format. Priceline shows you three hotel options in a bundle at a single price — but only one of those hotels is where you’ll actually stay. You don’t find out which one until after you book. All three are in the same neighborhood and star category, so the variance in quality is theoretically lower than a full Express Deal. In practice the spread is still real, and you should go in knowing that.

Pricebreakers tend to appear more frequently in leisure markets — Las Vegas, Orlando, Miami Beach — where hotel inventory is deep and properties compete aggressively on rate. In less competitive markets, you may not see Pricebreakers at all.

Honestly, Express Deals are the more useful product for most travelers. Pricebreakers feel like a gimmick unless you’re going somewhere with dense, interchangeable resort-style hotel inventory where all three options would genuinely satisfy you.

Can You Still Get the Same Deals Without Bidding

Probably should have opened with this section, honestly — because this is what people who actually used NYYP aggressively want to know. The short answer is yes, and the method comes from the BetterBidding community, which spent years reverse-engineering Priceline’s opaque inventory.

The technique works because Express Deals expose enough metadata to narrow down the hotel to one or two candidates before you commit. Here’s the process:

• Filter by the specific neighborhood Priceline offers (these map to real geographic zones)
• Note the star rating, review score range, and listed amenities exactly
• Cross-reference those attributes against hotels in that neighborhood on TripAdvisor or Google Maps
• Most markets have a short list of hotels that match a given combination of attributes — often just one or two candidates
• BetterBidding’s forums maintain active threads where users confirm which Express Deal matched which hotel, so you can check before booking

This method doesn’t always work. In dense urban markets like Midtown Manhattan, there may be eight 4-star hotels in a single Priceline zone and the amenity filters don’t narrow it down enough. But in places like Nashville, Austin, or San Diego, the zones are smaller and the inventory is thin enough that you can often identify the hotel with reasonable confidence before clicking buy.

Frustrated by a trip to Denver where I booked blind and ended up at a hotel a full mile outside the neighborhood Priceline had listed as central, I started using this cross-referencing method on every subsequent booking — and my hit rate on desirable properties went up significantly. The lesson: always check the BetterBidding forums for your specific market before committing to an Express Deal. It takes ten minutes and saves real money.

One more thing worth knowing: Priceline’s Express Deal prices are not static. They fluctuate based on availability and how close you are to the check-in date. Last-minute Express Deals (booked within 48 hours of arrival) sometimes hit deeper discounts than anything you’d see three weeks out. If you have flexibility on timing, that’s worth exploiting.

Rental Cars — Does Bidding Still Work

Yes, with qualifications. Priceline’s Name Your Own Price for rental cars still exists in 2026, but it’s not prominently featured in the interface the way it once was. You have to look for it — on the rental car search page, there’s typically a toggle or link to access the bidding option, and depending on your market and travel dates, it may or may not surface viable options.

The rental car version of NYYP works differently from the old hotel version in a few important ways. You specify the car class (economy, compact, full-size, SUV), the pickup location, and the dates. You submit a bid per day. If a rental company accepts it — typically Enterprise, Hertz, National, or Alamo — you’re booked. You don’t know which company until after.

The savings potential is real but uneven. In markets with high rental car demand — Las Vegas, Miami, Maui — the bidding tool can be genuinely useful, and I’ve seen bids of $22 to $28 per day accepted for full-size cars in cities where published rates were running $55 to $70. In smaller markets or off-peak periods, the bidding tool often returns nothing, and you’re better off just comparing Costco Travel, AutoSlash, or Costco car rental rates directly.

The car version still has the same no-cancellation structure. Accepted bids are final. If you need flexibility — and given the state of the rental car market over the past few years, you might — don’t use the bidding tool. Book a refundable rate elsewhere and monitor for price drops through AutoSlash, which tracks rate changes and automatically rebooking on your behalf.

Is Priceline Worth Using in 2026

It depends entirely on what kind of traveler you are. That’s not a hedge — it’s the honest framing.

If you are price-first and flexible, Priceline’s Express Deals are still a legitimate tool. The savings are real. The 20% to 30% discount range is consistent across major markets, and when you combine the BetterBidding identification technique with strategic last-minute booking, you can replicate a significant portion of what NYYP delivered. The core value proposition — opaque inventory at a discount — survived the feature’s discontinuation.

If you need a specific hotel, cancellation flexibility, or the ability to earn hotel loyalty points, Priceline is not the right tool anymore. Express Deals are non-refundable and do not earn points at the property. You’re trading every perk for the discount, and for a lot of travelers in 2026, that’s not the right trade — especially if you’re chasing status with Marriott Bonvoy, World of Hyatt, or Hilton Honors.

Priceline also has a standard hotel search that functions like any other OTA — transparent pricing, cancellable rates, loyalty-eligible bookings through their VIP program. That part of the product is fine but undifferentiated. You can comparison-shop it against Booking.com (owned by the same parent company, Booking Holdings) and Hotels.com without losing anything.

The verdict in plain terms: Priceline in 2026 is a specialist tool for a specific type of trip. Leisure travel, fixed dates, flexible on property, prioritizing rate over everything else — that’s where it still wins. Business travel, points maximization, trips where you need to modify plans — look elsewhere.

Name Your Own Price as a concept is gone for hotels. What replaced it is less elegant and requires more homework. But the savings it was built on still exist inside the Express Deals product, just waiting for someone willing to do the cross-referencing to find them.