Has anyone ever used priceline and bid on a ticket. what type of itenary did you get, was it horrendous. thought i might do this for a family of five to rome. any comments?

Priceline does allow you to specify a maximum number of flight changes.

I've never booked flights, just hotel rooms, on PL, and I do know that you can only bid for up to 4 rooms on one bid -- have you already verified that you can bid for 5 airline tickets simultaneously?

For thorough discussions of PL experiences, policies and strategies, check out www.biddingfortravel.com.

I think you can bid for up to eight tickets at once, but people sometimes have better results when they bid for fewer at a time.

We used Priceline once and booked a flight on United from Philadelphia to Paris via Dulles for $250RT each (two people).

That's the only time I've had success with Priceline. I always drop out once the bidding starts to approach what I could buy elsewhere without the surprise factor.

I have the feeling that it might be tough to find five tickets on the same flight at a good price.

I've had many successful bids for domestic tickets and hotel rooms via Priceline, and the itineraries were more than acceptable. Then again, I did research before I bid and specify what I wanted to limit the kind of flights that I wanted.

Look on Hotwire first to see the prices, and checkout www.biddingfortravel.com for bidding strategies and bids that were accepted.

If you have affiliation with an airline or if you will be traveling more in the future, buying direct from the airlines and getting the miles might be better than saving only a few dollars. Check on orbitz.com to see what the fares are and compare them with the bids that you see were accepted in the link I provided.

Here's another recommendation to check Hotwire first.

I would recommend NOT bidding for fewer people than in your party unless you don't mind being on different flights.