B1

"The Priceline feature was officially removed on Sept. 1. The company said that the reason for the removal was customers just weren't using it. Brigit Zimmerman, PCLN's senior vice president of air and vacation packages, said it's "a heck of a lot easier," without the feature. Priceline also couldn't get much use out of the name-your-own-airfare option because of the lack of airlines . When it launched in the 1990s, there were several different airlines competing for passengers. However, the switch to four major airlines has resulted in less customers using the feature.... The name-your-own-price feature is still present for car rentals and hotel rooms. However, these have also been seeing less use lately, reports The Wall Street Journal."


Read more: http://investorplace.com/2016/09/pri...#ixzz4K5TkKjPv

lo2e

I'm not shocked. It was nice while it lasted.

cestmoi123

It was always a really tough proposition for me, given the incredibly high variability of what you were bidding for.

If airfare bidding had let you put in a relatively narrow (say 2-3 hour) departure and arrival window, then it might have been useful.

The way it was structured, it was like having hotel bidding for "a room, or possibly a tent, somewhere in a 30 mile radius of a given location, for either tonight or tomorrow night."

rasheed

Definitely a sad product departure. They was a place for such fares (which were way better than any standby product). I fully agree that the product use was dropping rapidly over the past few years.

In they heyday, you would get opaque bookings from almost every major airline including VX, UA, AA, DL, etc. And you were able to get miles on many of them..

I think vacation packages are really the only way left to get opaque fares without using consolidators.

This is coming from someone who had a Priceline fuel card back in the day (station marketing dollars paid for the fuel discount).

They still have a great co-brand card with Barclays.

I can see that bidding on hotels and cars is dropping because they offer so many express deals. On the car rental side, they continue to have good access to inventory with Avis/Budget and others, but the rate differential has not been as dramatic. On hotels, it is hard to justify the $5 per night savings from Express Deals with the risk of getting a property with not as good rating or guaranteed benefits.

And we all know Priceline's massive revenue is now mostly based on retail purchases not the opaque stuff.

Rasheed

seawolf

End of an era.

hammie

After reading about someone who booked a weekend trip, arrive Friday at 11:00 pm and return Sunday at 6:00 am, I realized this was not a viable product for me. How many folks have the flexibility of potentially losing two whole days to travel?

lo2e

For short trips like that, PL bidding was almost never the right product. For ones of a longer duration, it was a much more viable solution, but only if the traveler was truly flexible enough to make it work.