Headline News
Priceline.com Adds Innovations: Suite of Mobile Services, Inside Track Price Tracker
Priceline.com has added two innovations to make planning travel easier: a suite of mobile services and a suite of price tracking services.
The suite of mobile services enables travelers with Web-enabled wireless devices to search hotel inventories, pricing and availability in real-time, book rooms, check the status of their flights, and see recommended restaurants and local attraction reviews from Zagat Survey, LLC.
"We believe these enhancements make priceline.com one of the leading wireless services providers in the online travel space," said priceline.com's Chief Marketing Officer Brett Keller. "Many priceline.com customers are last-minute travelers who need the ability to check live hotel inventories, book their rooms in real-time and check their flight status while on the road. In addition, Zagat Survey's restaurant and attractions reviews provide unique, valuable content that can't be found on any other major online travel service."
Travelers can access priceline.com's mobile services in two ways. When accessed through a Web-enabled wireless device, www.priceline.com will automatically route visitors to the special wireless home page. Travelers also can access priceline.com's mobile services, by wireless device or computer, by visiting www.priceline.mobi.
Priceline's mobile features include:
• Search Hotels. Allows customers to search live, real-time hotel inventories and pricing by city and date. Once the desired hotel is located, customers can click on a link to be connected to Priceline's telephone booking service for hotels.
• Book Travel. Provides an easy connection to Priceline's telephone booking services for hotel rooms, air and hotel vacation packages and cruises.
• Flight Status. Automatically connects to the mobile flight status pages for American, Northwest, United and US Airways. Provides links that customers can use to dial flight status phone numbers for most major domestic and international airlines.
• Zagat-Rated Restaurants. Allows visitors to view highlights of Zagat-Rated restaurants by city. Each restaurant is accompanied by address, phone number, average price and Zagat's signature numerical rating of its food, decor and service.
• Zagat-Rated Attractions. Allows visitors to view highlights of Zagat-Rated attractions by city. Each attraction is accompanied by address, telephone number, cost (if any), and Zagat's signature numerical rating of its appeal, facilities and service.
• Customer Help. Provides e-mail and telephone links to Priceline customer service for hotels, vacation packages and cruises.
Inside Track Is Your Personal Ticket Scout
Priceline.com's Inside Track is a suite of free, personalized features for its airline tickets services. This sophisticated, yet personal ticket scout combs through thousands of flights and fares, both now and in the future, to find customers the best possible deals for the trips they want to take.
"With Inside Track, priceline.com delivers the kind of comprehensive market-wide price trend functionality consumers have come to expect from Web 2.0 travel applications, plus the savings that are unique to priceline.com due to our elimination of booking fees on published fares and our Name Your Own Price® airline ticketing service," Keller said.
For a tour of Inside Track, or to set up your own Inside Track, visit travela.priceline.com/insideTrack/flights.
Among its many features, Inside Track offers:
• Sample Fares To Destinations Around the World. Using an interactive map of the U.S., customers can click on a highlighted city or choose from a drop-down menu of hundreds more cities. Inside Track will instantly display a collection of recent fares from that city to other destinations around the U.S.—and around the world.
• Fare Trend Analysis. Customers also will see whether fares for their desired trip have gone up or down recently—and by what percent.
• Individual Market-Specific "Best Days To Fly" Calendar. Fares can vary dramatically depending on travel dates. For a specific trip, customers can select a month and Inside Track will show them day-by-day round-trip and one-way fare comparisons. This feature, one of priceline.com's most popular during the holidays, has been enhanced to focus on any trip and time frame a customer chooses.
• Price Drop Alerts. Customers who put their favorite trips into their personalized Priceline traveler profile will receive e-mail alerts when fares drop for specific travel dates they've searched. The alerts contain the departure and return dates, the old price, the new price and the percentage savings. Customers also receive alerts when the overall price for a ticket drops.
• Latest Flight Price Trends From Around The Country. This feature tracks and shows flight price trends to and from different destinations around the country.
As always, priceline.com customers looking for a particular trip will be presented with an easily searchable grid of different published-price fares from all the leading network airlines, as well as regional and low-cost airlines such as JetBlue. Priceline.com charges no booking fees on its published-price domestic and international fares. This means that, in most cases, priceline.com customers will pay less for their tickets than they would at other major full-service online travel reservation services, including Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz.
For more information about Priceline, visit www.priceline.com.