| In its few short months, Priceline has
gained incredible press as the a great source for cheap airline
tickets.
For those of you who are not familiar with Priceline.com, it is a
buying service for leisure airline tickets that lets you name your
price. In order to use the service, you must register with your
travel dates, destination, credit card information and the price
that you are willing to pay.
Within one hour, Pricleine will tell you if they found an airline
that will meet your price. If they find flights within your
specifications, they will use your credit card to purchase the
ticket. Initially, it sounded like a great idea, airlines could fill
unsold seats with bids from travelers. Airlines could gain extra
revenue and consumers could save a bundle.
However, we have some major problems with the system:
- Priceline is rather inflexible on travel times. You
must be willing to travel between 6AM and 10PM on the days you
select with the possibility of a two hour layover. You do not have
the option of rejecting the flights if Priceline.com meets your
price.
- You do not collect frequent flyer miles.
- There are no refunds on tickets or changes to your itenary
allowed.
- Priceline strongly recommends that you enter a price above
the airlines lowest published advanced economy ticket. From
this statement, we gather that Priceline cannot get you really
cheap tickets.
- Tax is not included. Under normal circumstances,
airfare is always quoted with tax. At Priceline, they add tax to
your bid price.
We have read some relatively negative
reports on Priceline. Business Week reported (June 1, 1998) that
Priceline has deals to get unpublihsed fares with only two domestic
airlines, TWA and America West. (And with TWA, you can already save
20% on most fares by using LowestFare.com.) After reading
their site, we had assumed that they worked with most major
airlines. After learning they only had a couple of unpublished fare
deals, we figured that they act more like a discount travel agent
than an auction service. Although a travel agent passes all the
savings onto you. If you enter an incorrect bid, Priceline gets to
make additional money.
Read
more reviews written by others including Business Week,
CNNFn, MSNBC, and BestFares.com.
Read
actual customer feedback. By reading how others used the
service, you may get some insights for your bid.
Please
describe your experience with Priceline here. By getting
feedback from users like you, we can provide better information for
others.
If you are about to use Priceline, please come back and tell us
about it.
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