Just started playing around with Hotel Canary and priceline, and can’t find an answer to this question on the forums or on HC support page – when you look at the hotel suggestions in hotel canary, there is a green price shown in the box; what does that price indicate? On a few hotels, it’s been lower than the Express Deal price, but when I click on it, it just brings me back to the priceline main page.
I thought it might be what PL has the hotel listed for if you book it as a regular booking, but that wasn’t the case when I looked up the individual hotels.
Those are not actual prices. They are to help you determine which hotel you might be getting. Sometimes you only get one option which makes the guess work easier. With these “green numbers”, on multiple options, I can figure out which hotel I may be getting based on price.
With this example I found a 3.5 star hotel, rated a 6+, at Disney Springs for $58 / night. The only option that is close to that price is the Wyndham Garden Lake and at 6.9. This is probably the hotel as the price is the closest and matches the rating 6.9 out of 10. The other two hotels are rated 8+
However, if they’d all been rated 6.0 - 6.9 the price would have been the way I’d be able to guess which hotel I was getting.
I don’t know that that’s so, it looks to me like the rating is the actual hotel rating, not the likelihood of getting that hotel…plus, this is what I see when I select a 4.5 star in Bonnet Creek:
and the only option is the Swan…but the price in that box is significantly lower than the deal price, and is also significantly lower than the standard Swan price. Maybe it’s a suggestion, as in don’t select unless lower than this price?
I seem to not have communicated this well. I do mean that number is the hotel rating.
Hotel Canary is using a formula of location / rating (not stars) / average price to help you figure out what hotel is being offered by Priceline Express. It is not guaranteeing the hotel it shows you is what you’ll get. It is only making an educated guess.
In your example, Hotel Canary is guessing that you may be getting an offer on The Swan. However, the price per night doesn’t seem to match an average rack rate for that hotel. Using that info, I would say this rate is not for The Swan and Hotel Canary is incorrect.
Thanks for your continued efforts, I appreciate it! And I had read that post and several of the threads in the forums about HC/PE and upon reading more of the giant thread about it by JJT, I discovered that that green price is indeed supposed to be the price for the resort if booked through regular priceline rather than express deals. I also saw that the green price links are known to no longer be active and only take you to the PL main page.
So, I checked the regular PL prices for my resorts on my dates, and they were nowhere even close to the prices in HC, which seemed (and are) obscenely low for my dates, which are Dec 11-13 of this year.
Being a smartish cookie, I decided to check and see what tonight’s rates are for the hotels in the list, and BINGO – that’s exactly what they are.
So for anyone else trying to figure out the green prices: they are simply what today’s priceline rates are for those hotels. Which kind of makes it a useless metric for determining which hotel it is for the dates selected, but at least I no longer have to wonder where those amazing deals are.
@JJT this might be relevant to your interests if you haven’t noticed the issue before.
Yes - The HC developer seems to have abandoned the Chrome extension now, so after some Priceline page and URL changes made last year HC features like the “regular” Priceline price (the green numbers) and the link to go to the PL hotel page just don’t work anymore.
(I took some time to crack into the Chrome extension and was able to create a version that led to the hotel page, but never got it working to use the dates of your actual Express Deal search. Maybe one day when I have more time.)
FWIW, If you just want to go to a PL hotel page quickly to get an actual price over there, on my PE Simple Search form I have a table of links that points to each hotel. I created that after I noticed HC was borked.
A question for clarification: is the HC chrome extension no longer trustworthy if it’s been abandoned by the developer? is there something else to use that would be better? I still see that HC is largely recommended on a lot of PL express blogs, so i’m curious!
AFAIK, it’s still reliable regarding suggestions, but the pricing it shows is not the pricing for your stay, but rather for the current day. --also note that even if it was being updated by the developer, they are still only suggestions and not guarantees.
Now I am confused. I thought the whole point was to try to figure out what hotel they were suggesting. So, currently what is the best way to find out what possible hotels could be? I would only deviate from my current plan if I was in a Disney partner hotel where I could keep my fast passes.
That is the whole point, BUT there are absolutely no guarantees that the suggestion is absolutely 100% the one being offered, it’s just extremely likely that it is. There is no surefire way to know what hotel it is, but I’m pretty sure HC is the best way to date. It’s the risk one takes in trying to get the hotel they want at a lower price.
Definitely not useless! Check out @JJT 's resources as well, he’s done amazing research and has generously shared it with everyone! Good luck finding a great deal!
Oh, I agree with crankyduck, HC is far from useless.
It has always had its issues guessing certain resorts, but I just compare the various hotel info to the deal and can can be pretty sure of any deal at this point.
Oh my - some kind of lag in the system. These replies are showing as hours - heck, even days! - old, but they were definitely not there when I chimed in.
Hmm… issue on my end or TP end? Anyone else having issues?
