Priceline Deals: Let’s Get Sporty

We brought you all some very good news back in February when Priceline hidden deals for Disney resorts returned – now we’re back with a breakdown of a nice batch of All-Star Sports hidden deals running from now through June.

If you *gasp* didn’t read the previous Priceline blog post already or would like a quick primer on how to look for hidden deals, be sure to take a look at Priceline Deals: A Blast from the Past Returns.

So, how nice are these Sports hidden deals?

The technical term is “Pretty Darn Nice.”
(Note to Touring Plans legal: Can I trademark that phrase?)

Finding the Deal

If you scroll down through search results, you’ll find All-Star Sports listed as a 3-Star Hotel in Bonnet Creek with an 8+ guest rating and 600 reviews. (Priceline is calling reviews “Ratings” now.) Below is an example with a non-hidden Sports deal alongside it for comparison.

You can see that all the factors match up in these two listings. The only thing that might throw a wrench into our very educated guess that this is a Sports hidden deal is if there is another resort that has the same ratings and review counts. In fact, right now there is one other resort in Bonnet Creek that matches Sports: Art of Animation. However, a couple of things help us determine it is not an Art of Animation hidden deal.

First, it was fairly rare even years ago to see that resort listed this cheaply. Since the Skyliner that likelihood certainly has not gone up.

Also, those crossed-out prices match up exactly, which is a big tell in the hidden deal industrial complex, I can tell you.

(Another call back to reading the last Priceline post if you haven’t already: even if those crossed-out prices do not match up, they still can help identify if you click through each and match up the specific room listings.)

In the current example, clicking through to both the hidden and regular deals provides the following room choices:

Looking at those crossed-out “full” prices tells me these hidden deals are almost certainly Standard rooms in this Sports drop. Might you get some other sort of room? Anything is possible, but I suspect fairly unlikely.

Comparing the Deal

So, let’s see how Pretty Darn Nice (not yet trademarked, but maybe soon, fingers crossed) a savings can be had for these All-Star Sports hidden deals. Currently, Disney has their Stay Longer discount rate active, so in the table below we’re comparing the hidden deal to three possible ways to book:

You can see that in this example that by booking these hidden deals, we are looking at savings in the neighborhood of $75 per night. That is nothing to sneeze at. (Although, it suddenly occurs to me that I’m not sure there is anything we SHOULD be sneezing at? Hmm.)

When Can I Book These Deals?

In the giant Calendar of Deals, April and May are a little spotty in availability, but there are deals to be found. June is an overflowing cornucopia of Sports, so lace on your cleats and start booking!

A note on these calendars: they are the deals we found, but Priceline loves to be inconsistent. So, you may find more or less deals than we did by trying different desktop and/or mobile browsers, using their app, moving start and end dates around, or chanting and waving churro-scented incense over your monitor. Also, these were all found by searching for 2-night bookings since that tactic tends to tease Priceline into showing more deals. So, you may find some of the gaps in these calendars can be filled in if you were searching for a 1-night booking.

In general, both Priceline and Hotwire tend to offer more hidden deals in their apps – although that is far more common with Hotwire.
(Still no Disney resorts spotted in Hotwire hidden deals, but we’ll keep watching for them!)

If you’ve booked one of these hidden deals or found any others, let us know in the comments!