Following up on its elimination of all booking fees on published-price domestic and international airfares, priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) announced today that it has decided to implement three new fee chops on its published-price hotel reservation service. The moves, which will lower bottom-line prices for hotel rooms reserved through priceline.com, take effect immediately.
“The fee chops announced today are expected to put millions of dollars of savings back into our hotel customers’ pockets, as we have already done with our elimination of booking fees on published-price airline tickets,” said Tim Gordon, priceline.com’s Senior Vice President, Hotels. “Priceline is working hard to keep our prices lower than Expedia.com, Travelocity and Orbitz. We believe that, once consumers check out the bottom line on their hotel bill, they will make Priceline their #1 hotel booking choice among the major online travel agencies.”
The three fee chops announced today are:
1. Priceline has permanently lowered its booking fees for all published-price hotel reservations.
2. Priceline will no longer charge a fee to cancel a published-price hotel reservation.
3. Priceline will no longer charge a fee to change a published-price hotel reservation.
Almost all other major online hotel reservation services continue to charge as much as $25 in change/cancel fees for certain reservations. Today’s fee cancellations by Priceline do not affect change or cancel rules that may be required by specific hotels.
About Priceline.com(R) Incorporated
Priceline.com Incorporated (Nasdaq: PCLN) www.priceline.com provides online travel services in 21 languages in over 60 countries in Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Included in the priceline.com family of companies is Booking.com, a leading international online hotel reservation service, priceline.com, a leading U.S. online travel service for value-conscious leisure travelers, and Agoda.com, an Asian online hotel reservation service.
Priceline.com believes that Booking.com is Europe’s largest and fastest growing hotel reservation service, with a network of affiliated Web sites. Booking.com operates in over 60 countries in 17 languages and offers its customers access to over 45,000 participating hotels worldwide.
In the U.S., priceline.com gives customers more ways to save on their airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, vacation packages and cruises than any other Internet travel service. In addition to getting great published prices, leisure travelers can narrow their searches using priceline.com’s TripFilter advanced search technology, customize their search activity through priceline.com’s Inside Track features, create packages to save even more money, and take advantage of priceline.com’s famous Name Your Own Price® service, which can deliver the lowest prices
Priceline.com also operates the following travel websites: Travelweb.com, Lowestfare.com, RentalCars.com and BreezeNet.com. Priceline.com also has a personal finance service that offers home mortgages, refinancing and home equity loans through an independent licensee. Priceline.com licenses its business model to independent licensees, including priceline mortgage and certain international licensees.
Contacts:
Brian Ek, 203-299-8167
brian.ek@priceline.com
