SkyAuction Bidding

[Jailen's Gma]

I would like as much information as I can get on bidding on resorts as possible. I have never bid on anything before, so I am a little nervous.

I want to bid on 2 units for August, so that we will have enough room for all that are planning on coming with us and I need to keep the price low due to most of them are young adults with not a big budget.

Please help me!!

Thanks,
Mary

 

[maggiew]

Mary,
I have never bid on Skyauction, but was thinking about doing it for our trip in August. What I have been doing is putting the auctions in my AUCTION WATCH on the skyauction page and then monitoring what the winning bid prices have been. That way I can get an idea about the winning costs.

I hope by bumping this up that others will have advice too, because I am also interested.

Maggie

 

[Jailen's Gma]

Maggie,

Thanks for idea of Auction Watch. I can keep an eye on a couple of resorts I want to try for.

I see we will be there at the same time.

Thanks,
Mary

 

[HeatherC]

Mary - You may want to try one of SkyAuction's "READY SET GO" auctions. When you go on their site just do a search for key word "ready". They have one or two of these auctions closing each day.

You then choose Orlando, the dates you want and the size villa you want. It will then search for available resorts for that time frame.
The nice thing about this is that you can actually reserve the specific resort you want before you win the auction. That way you are guaranteed to stay where you want and you won't find out that there isn't availability after you already won.

The auctions have been running it seems anywhere between $45-$70 a week. Then there will be an additional tax and service charge of $195 per villa for the week. So you can win a weeks stay for around $250 - $300.

If you win, you have to pay right away and then they will email you a "guest certificate" which you just hand to the resort at check in.

We used them for this in November and won Orange Lake (which was awesome). This May we are staying at Silver Lake which we also won at Sky Auction.

What I do is when I see what resorts are available, I check out TripAdvisor.com to see if there are any reviews about it.

Hope this helps you.

Heather

P.S. The one thing I find is that if you win over the weekend, their office is closed so you have to wait until Monday to call them with any questions. Can be frustrating if you win on Friday night and then have to wait all weekend to get a question answered.

 

[tinkerbell6]

We used Skyauction for our accomodations on this upcoming trip. We found it easy to use. I just watched some auctions for a week or so, to see what things seemed to be going for. Then when we decided the max we were willing to spend we jumped in, lost the first time out, but the second time we used an autobid as we wouldn't be home when the auction ended, and ended up winning!

I know some people who've used Skyauction quite a bit, and the only advice they gave me was to make sure you read the fine print in the auction about additional per night or weekly charges, and to maybe pick an auction that ends during a weekday when more people would not be at home and able to watch the end of an auction. Who knows?

We are staying at the Vistana, which I see you stayed at twice. How was it, and do you remember what part of the resort you were at? We're a bit wary about the park shuttle from the resort, wondering if it goes often enough.

The trip's coming soon!

Lisa

 

[Jailen's Gma]

Lisa and HeatherC,

Thanks for the info on bidding.

Yes, we stayed there twice. First time in the Court section which we thought was pretty nice. We must have been lucky. The second time in the Lakes. We really enjoyed it there. I hope we can stay there again.

We didn't use the shuttle, we had a rental. We were very close to the pools in both areas we stayed.

Thanks again,
Mary