Priceline.com is an online travel agency that specializes in locating low-cost airline tickets and hotel accommodations.
The organization makes it easier for its providers to provide travel services to its clients.
Priceline.com is based in Norwalk, Connecticut, and is owned entirely by Booking Holdings, which also owns Kayak.com, Booking.com, and other sites.
Priceline says that its several discount initiatives, such as Express Deals, Tonight-Only Deals, and Pricebreakers, save customers more than $1 billion each year.
Price-line VIP loyalty members can receive additional discounts.
However, have Priceline bargains truly gone where no man (or online travel agent) has gone before?
Here’s all you need to know about booking and saving money with Priceline.
History
Price-line was created by Jay S. Walker, who departed the business in 2000, by which time Citicorp’s #2, Richard S. Braddock, had taken over as CEO.
Braddock left in 2004, after assisting in the company’s initial public offering in 1999.
Michael Loeb, an entrepreneur, helped with “development and early finance.”
Priceline sprang to prominence with its Name Your Own Price method, which allowed customers to set their own prices for airline tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals, and holiday packages.
While the buyer has the option of selecting a general location, service level, and pricing.
The sales are for oblique travel inventory; specifics are revealed only after the transaction is complete, with no cancellation option.
The distinction between the price recommended by a client and the amount charged by the service provider is Priceline’s profit from revenues.
It has also introduced a more traditional model dubbed Express Deals, in which travelers are given pricing and a geographical perimeter within which the hotel would be located but are not given the name of the establishment.
Priceline has a service called Pricebreakers for hotel reservations.
It boasts that the hotels’ prices are up to 50% off retail.
It is similar to Express Deal, except instead of presenting the physical location inside a perimeter, it displays the names of three hotels, with one of the hotels being assigned after payment is completed.
Travelers can continue to set their own prices for airline tickets, hotel rooms, and rental automobiles.
The number of airlines, hotels, and car rental companies participating in the name your own price program has grown as these providers use the Priceline-created opaque market to sell their perishable inventory without cutting rates through other traditional sales channels.
Priceline also offers inexpensive cruises, tours, and attractions.
Priceline leased its Name Your Own Price travel system to eBay in 2002.
Priceline “permanently” abolished all booking fees on published tickets in November 2007.
Priceline.com Incorporated changed its name to “The Priceline Group Inc.” in April 2014.
The corporate name change was designed to differentiate the global Priceline operation.
Priceline.com is now one of Booking Holdings’ six core brands.
Priceline stated in May 2015 that it would invest an extra $250 million in Chinese online travel business Ctrip in order to enter the rapidly expanding Chinese market.
Priceline’s Name Your Own Price offerings for flight reservations terminated in 2016, rental cars in 2018, and hotels in 2020.
Other Services
Priceline.com explored with selling gasoline and groceries under the Name Your Own Price model through a partially owned affiliate, WebHouse Club, in 2000, during the height of the dot-com bubble.
Priceline entered the online auction sector with Priceline Yard Sales, in which customers used the Priceline system to haggle for various second-hand things and trade them in person.
Priceline used the Name Your Own Price approach to sell long-distance phone service and autos.
These experiments came to an end in 2002.
Another experiment, the Name Your Own Rate system for house loans, is still in operation thanks to a license from EverBank.
Brett Keller was hired CEO of the priceline.com brand in 2016.
How does Priceline Work?
Priceline is a subsidiary of Booking Holdings, the world’s largest travel company, which also owns Kayak, Rentalcars.com, and OpenTable.
Price-line, which can be accessed via priceline.com or its mobile app, provides tailored recommendations for tourists, including alternative lodgings such as private houses, yachts, and yurts.
Travelers can combine hotels, airfare, and rental vehicles in a single transaction – and frequently at a discount.
Enter your dates and destination, and Price-line will recommend flights, hotels, and rental cars to get you there. Price-line, as an OTA, makes the booking process easier. Meanwhile, someone else provides the actual travel services, whether it’s a huge hotel chain or a small, family-owned bed & breakfast.
Price-line has pretty sophisticated booking capabilities, particularly for tourists who prefer to book all aspects of their vacation – airfare, hotel, and rental vehicle — all at once rather than individually.
Price-line’s Trip Builder technology allows consumers to combine those purchases into a single transaction, while also unlocking previously inaccessible privately negotiated pricing. According to Priceline, their packaged deals save travelers an average of $240 every transaction.
And the Trip Builder tool is quite adaptable. Combining features from multiple websites can be restrictive.
They can force you to schedule a flight (even if you would have chosen a road trip) or do not allow for several city stopovers.
Trip Builder, on the other hand, takes into account specific travel situations and eliminates numerous restrictions seen elsewhere.
Your tour can include a mix of private houses and hotel stays.
You can also combine a trip that does not include a flight.
Priceline deals
Name Your Own Price, Price-line’s most renowned deal, has been retired.
The Name Your Own Price deal was a bidding tool that allowed you to bargain hotel rates up to 60% off retail and flight rates up to 40% off retail.
There are still lots of additional Price-line deals to be had.
Express Deals
Express Deals debuted in 2012 with the promise of providing the same discounts as bidding but with the added benefit of immediate booking.
Perhaps the most notable feature of Express Deals:
When you book, you don’t know the name of the hotel or airline, but it might save you up to 50%.
You won’t know your exact departure and arrival timings until you buy tickets for the flying version of the Express Deals function.
Instead, you’re merely given an estimated arrival or departure time, such as early in the morning.
Prior to booking hotels through Express Deals, you will receive information such as the star rating, customer rating, neighborhood, and amenities.
The real hotel is not revealed until the booking is completed.
There are several methods for determining the identity of your Priceline hotels before making a purchase.
But, in the end, it’s typically exactly what it’s claimed to be – a surprise until you buy.
Pricebreakers
If you want a better sense of the hotel you’ll be staying at but still want to take a chance, look into the Pricebreakers deal, which debuted in 2020.
Consider it a variation on hotel roulette, only you only get one of three known alternatives.
Pricebreakers displays three distinct (but similar) hotels, each with a single price.
When you book the Pricebreakers deal, you’ll get a reservation for one of those precise hotels, however Price-line will choose the actual one.
Price-line guarantees that every hotel booked via Pricebreakers has a customer rating of 7 or higher and is available at up to half off published rates found elsewhere.
Tonight-Only Deals
The Tonight-Only Deals promotion, available only through its app, provides last-minute hotel deals in most major cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Honolulu, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and San Francisco.
Priceline’s app advertises 3-star and 4-star hotelrooms that can be booked for check-in that same night (with a maximum four-night stay) at discounts of up to 35% off published prices available elsewhere with Tonight-Only Deals.
Reservations for rooms can be made instantly until 11 p.m. local time, or until they sell out.
Recurring annual sales Priceline, like many other travel booking services, has seasonal sales at specific seasons of the year. Priceline offers fantastic deals on Cyber Monday and Black Friday.
During the 2021 Black Friday weekend, for example, 2,000 lucky buyers received a coupon code good for 99 percent off Express Deal hotels. Price-line handed out Black Friday coupons for up to an additional 30% off Express Deals on top of everyday savings of up to 60% off to everyone else.
Why do we like Priceline?
Priceline Express offers
Priceline still gives you a chance to snag amazing flight (or hotel and auto rental) prices with features like their opaque ExpressDeals (more on that below), which can save you up to 50% on your flight.
These Express Deals can be a terrific find if you’re a flexible traveler trying to save money.
Best Price Guaranteed
Travelers may purchase flights with complete trust on Price-line. Priceline’s Best Price Guarantee states that if you find a lower price within 24 hours of making your reservation, they will refund the difference.
Price-line is so confident in its Express Deals that they’ll refund you 200 percent of the difference if you find a lower bargain up to midnight before you leave.
Priceline’s Restrictions
Does not allow for multi-city operations.
Priceline does not allow you to search for flights departing from numerous airports, unlike other flight search engines. So, if you’re close to both the Philadelphia and New York airports, you’ll need to conduct numerous searches.
Doesn’t always find the best deal
Price-line rarely, if ever, found the cheapest flight costs in our searches when compared to other OTAs and flight search engines.
Express Deals are included.
To discover the best flight prices, search Price-line as well as other sites.
There are too many “deal” possibilities.
This may sound crazy, but bear with us.
Within Priceline, there are nearly too many competing offer possibilities to choose from.
This is obviously a good thing in general, but with pop-ups and boxes offering different prices via the website, mobile app, and even over the phone, it can be difficult to know that you’re receiving the greatest value available.
There are no price alerts.
Priceline, unlike many other prominent airline search engines and OTAs, does not presently allow you to establish price alerts.
So, if you’re hoping for a price drop before purchasing a ticket, you’ll just have to keep checking.
How to Use Priceline
Begin with the fundamentals.
Priceline’s flight search method is straightforward and quite similar to that of comparable OTAs such as Expedia or Skyscanner.
Go to Priceline and enter your key flight information, including dates and airports “departing from” and “heading to.”
You can also opt to add a rental car or hotel to your search at this point, making it easier to organize your entire trip at once.
Examine and contrast flight results
Priceline will order your flight results by cheapest to most expensive.
You can also make some extra changes at this point, such as deciding how many layovers you’re willing to take.
For the sake of this search, I selected “up to 1 stop.”
You’ll also notice that the first flight listed is one of the previously mentioned Expedia Express Deals.
We’ll go over these in more detail later, but these flights can cost up to 50% less than other flight options.
Choose your outbound and return flights.
Once you’ve chosen a departure flight that appears to be a suitable fit, you’ll be prompted to select a return trip.
Priceline will show you the price differences between the return flight alternatives and even allows you to book a different airline entirely, though these are nearly always much more expensive.
Book your flight on Priceline.
The purchasing procedure is similarly simple.
After you’ve chosen your desired itinerary, you’ll be led to a page where you can confirm your flights, read about baggage policies, and choose an upgrade if needed.
After you’ve chosen your cabin class, you’ll be guided through the payment procedure, which you can complete without ever leaving Priceline.
What are Priceline Express Deals?
Priceline Express Deals enable you save up to 50% on your flight (or hotel stay) by concealing essential facts such as layovers, departure times, and airlines until after your nonrefundable booking is complete.
In our earlier example, the express flight was promoted above all other flight alternatives.
You can, however, search for Express Deals directly from the homepage.
Then you’ll be shown the flight’s restricted details.
In our example, you can see that the flights will still depart from our preferred airports, but will have 0-2 layovers and can depart at any time between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m.
Express Deals, as you can see, aren’t for discerning travelers or those on a tight timetable.
Instead, they’re a terrific way for budget-conscious visitors to find cheap tickets.
The Best Credit Cards for Priceline Reservations
When you book with certain travel credit cards that work well with online travel agencies like Expedia, Hotels.com, or Price-line, you can earn bonus points and rewards.
Here are the best credit cards for Priceline users:
Visa® Priceline VIP RewardsTM Card
While not the finest credit card for ordinary everyday spending, the Price-line VIP RewardsTM Visa® Card is one of the best cards for Priceline transactions.
It receives 5 points for every $1 spent on Priceline purchases, bookings, and reservations.
It also receives 2 points for restaurant and gas expenditures and 1 point for all other transactions.
Priceline points are about one cent each, so you’ll receive a 5% back on all Priceline transactions made with this card. What’s particularly good is that you may redeem your rewards as statement credits, so you’re not forced to earn points in a loyalty program you might not use regularly.
Other advantages of card ownership include automatic Priceline VIP Gold status. In addition, if you spend $10,000 on the card within each card membership year, you’ll be eligible for a statement credit for the $100 Global Entry application cost or the $85 TSA PreCheck application fee.
Given that the Priceline VIP RewardsTM Visa® Card has no annual charge, it’s difficult to be too critical of this card. Furthermore, the extra benefits can be substantial.
Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card
This card is useful for all types of travel purchases, not just Priceline.
Use this card to receive 5 points per dollar on non-Priceline travel booked through Chase. You’ll also receive 3 points per dollar spent on dining out, streaming services, and online grocery shopping; 2 points per dollar spent on other trips (including online travel websites like Expedia); and 1 point per dollar spent on everything else.
The card, which has an annual charge of $95, also offers an initial offer: Earn 60,000 extra points after spending $4,000 on purchases within the first three months of account opening. When you redeem with Chase Ultimate Rewards®, you will receive $750 toward travel.
Cancelling a trip booked on Priceline
Priceline has a plethora of deals, especially for those who are flexible about where they stay and when they go.
But, for all of the benefits of booking on Price-line, there are some drawbacks, and cancellations are among the most serious.
Many of the most significant reductions cannot be adjusted or canceled.
This includes Express Offers (deals in which the whole itinerary is revealed only after booking), which are non-changeable and nonrefundable.
Change and cancellation rules vary for bookings that are not part of Price-line’s mystery deals.
Whether or not your journey can be refunded is frequently determined by the provider’s rules, not by Price-line’s.
A basic economy flight may not be eligible for a refund, but an upgraded ticket may.
You may also be able to alter your reservation in some instances – However, only for a fee.
Fees vary by provider and can be found in your online itinerary.
How to Cancel a Priceline Booking
You can use Price-line’s self-service cancellation feature if your reservation is cancellable.
Click the My Trips button from a logged-in Priceline account, then select View/Cancel Itinerary next to the reservation you want to cancel.
Read the unique policy for each cancellation, as they can differ in terms of how much money you’ll actually receive back.
Flights can also be canceled by phoning Price-line’s Customer Service at 800-774-2354.
How to contact Priceline
Use the Priceline Help Center for assistance with issues such as modifying or canceling your trip, obtaining a refund, or reporting a complaint.
If you can’t receive help using Priceline’s self-service tools, there are a few more options:
- Text Priceline’s customer service team at 33296.
- Launch Priceline’s chatbot from the Help Center.
- Make a phone call and chat with a live person. Priceline’s basic contact number is 877-477-5807.
How to maximize your rewards
You want a travel credit card that prioritizes what is important to you. Here are our selections for the top travel credit cards of 2022, including ones that are ideal for:
- Flexibility, point transfers, and a huge bonus: Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card
- No annual fee: Bank of America® Travel Rewards credit card
- Flat-rate travel rewards: Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card
- Bonus travel rewards and high-end perks: Chase Sapphire Reserve®
- Luxury benefits: American Express Platinum Card®
- Business travelers: Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card
How to Find Cheap Flights Using Priceline
Priceline has long been a go-to resource for travelers looking for low-cost flights.
Price-line, one of the oldest and most well-known names in the field of OTAs (Online Travel Agencies), is owned by Booking Holdings Inc., which also owns prominent OTAs like as Kayak and Momondo.
Price-line has always been regarded of as a site to book things like hotels and vehicle rentals.
This was mostly due to its famed and now-defunct Name Your Own Price feature, which offered substantial discounts while keeping important data like the hotel name hidden until after booking.
Price-line, on the other hand, can be a terrific way to get cheap flights if you know how to utilize it.
Especially if you’re looking for a one-stop shop for things like vehicle rentals and hotel reservations.
Continue reading to find out how and when you should utilize Price-line to book your trip.
Priceline Car Rental
Whether you’re going on a city break or a beach vacation, renting a car from Priceline will make your trip more exciting.
Take to the open road to explore the countryside, find hidden gems that are inaccessible by foot, or simply beat the crowds without having to figure out the public transportation system.
Price-line has a large selection of automobiles to meet every style of vacation, with pricing to suit all budgets.
Whether you want a stylish city car for zipping around town, a 4×4 for exploring the countryside, or a people carrier for a large group retreat, we have it all.
Most nations have rules requiring drivers to carry their photocard at all times, so keep it in your wallet or in the dashboard of the rental car.
Renting a car from Price-line makes getting to and from the airport a breeze.
You don’t have to cram your stuff onto overcrowded buses or worry about missing your flight back to the airport.
You can enjoy a stress-free start and end to your vacation if you allow enough time for your journey and keep a careful eye on local traffic.
FAQs
How can you get in touch with Priceline customer service?
If your submission is about a reservation, please call 877-477-5807 or chat with us here.
Is Priceline safe?
Price-line is quite secure. They are a trustworthy organization that exclusively works with the most well-known lodging providers in the travel industry.
It is safe to book accommodations through them and to pay for them with a credit card or a PayPal account.
Can you use the Priceline promo code?
How to use Priceline coupons.
Priceline coupons can be added to your booking fee after you have selected your travel information on the website.
When you check out, enter the coupon code, click Apply, and they will deduct a dollar amount off your total booking cost under “Summary of Charges” on your bill.
When is the best time to book a flight on Priceline?
“Our research suggests that Fridays have the lowest ADRs for tourists.”
In contrast to airfare, the most expensive day to reserve a hotel is usually on a Sunday.” Nagle’s data, on the other hand, indicated differently. “According to Price-line analysts, the best day of the week to book a hotel for the lowest prices was on Sunday,” Nagle added.
What is Priceline’s new name?
On Wednesday, Price-line Group changed its name to Booking Holdings, focusing on its hotel and home-rental division, which is the company’s largest. Starting Tuesday, the company will trade under the symbol BKNG instead of PCLN.
How long does it take for Priceline to provide a refund?
If you requested a refund, you may have to wait two to three days for the refund to be processed. Depending on the circumstances, it could take even longer.
If you are eligible for a refund, the money will be deposited into your bank account within a few days.
Is it safe to purchase airline tickets on Priceline?
Priceline is quite secure. They are a trustworthy organization that exclusively works with the most well-known lodging providers in the travel industry. It is safe to book accommodations through them and to pay for them with a credit card or a PayPal account.
Is Priceline stock a good investment?
Priceline has outperformed the S&P 500 in every year but 2014 over the last five years. Before falling 13% last week, the stock was up about 30% year to date, compared to around 17% for the S&P 500.
