Priceline hack for flying out of Paine Field

I’ll have to try this a few more times before I know for sure that this is a reliable hack, but it works so far:

If you search on Priceline for one-way flights out of Seattle, you may see an offer for a flight deal out of Paine Field which is $100-$200 cheaper than normal, with the caveat that they won’t reveal the flight details until right after the (non-refundable) purchase, but before purchase they will tell you constraints like:

• leaves after 3 PM on the date selected
• max layover 3 hours

The idea is to offer a deal to people who can live with the inconvenience of not knowing the departure time until they’ve committed to the purchase.

Here’s the trick: just do a separate search on Priceline for flights out of Paine Field that day. (You’ll also see the “reveal-details-after-purchase” deal in those search results, but you can ignore that.) Look at the results where they do give you all the flight details in advance, and often there will only be ONE that matches the criteria for the Priceline secret deal (e.g. departs after 3 PM with max 3 hour layover), and that’s how you know the flight departure time before deciding whether to purchase it.

This doesn’t usually work with flights out of Sea-Tac because there are too many flights out of that airport, which means usually too many flight options that match the criteria of the Priceline “secret deal” and you don’t know which one you’re getting. But it does seem to work for Paine Field.

One more thing: do the search for flights out of SeaTac and take the “secret deal” out of Paine Field from those search results, rather than doing the search for flights out of Paine Field directly and taking the “secret detail” there. When I tried both, the listing for the “secret deal” out of Paine Field was $30 cheaper when it was listed in the search results for flights out of Seattle, rather than when it was listed in the results for flights out of Paine Field. (I assume the reason is that if someone is searching for flights out of Seattle, they’d rather fly out of there than Paine Field, so you have to sweeten the deal to get them to switch to a flight out of Paine Field.)

(Also: public transit from Seattle proper to Paine Field can take up to 2 hours, and none of the stations where I changed buses had bathrooms, so plan accordingly.)