     |
What are the cheap airline fares, are they correct"CHEAP AIRLINE FARES"
Can't find what you need? Try a Google Web Search in the box below!
8/8/1999 "1/3 Priceline.com spent $24 million last year to have Star Trek's William Shatner, resplendent in a dark suit and hair plugs, tell us that its site was the best in the galaxy for finding cheap airline fares." That slick marketing campaign, which featured full-page ads splashed across the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, belied the fact that Priceline had airline tickets from only two airlines - financially strapped TWA and regional carrier America West. But it raised the company's profile dramatically, and in the past nine months it has since secured airline tickets from Delta, Northwest and Continental, three of the five largest U.S. airlines. Can't find what you need? Try a Google Web Search in the box below!
Even so, Priceline should be the last place you look for cheap airline fares. Indeed, the service works best, if at all, after you've checked with most online travel agents, other travel Web sites, or the airlines themselves, many of which will be able to offer comparable or better cheap airfares. You can find some steals on Priceline. A colleague used it to book a weekend hotel in Chicago and ended up at the luxurious Fairmount for $75 a night, well below the posted rates of $350. But that same colleague paid $250 to fly on TWA to Seattle in July, with a stop in St. Louis. If he'd checked around, he could have booked a nonstop flight on Northwest Airlines for $7 more. Priceline is essentially a blind auction. After filling out your itinerary and handing over a credit card number, you are free to "name your price" for cheap airline fares. But Priceline doesn't tell you anything about the airline tickets. Not the airline, not the airfares price range, not the departure time, and there's no indication of how many stops you will have to make enroute. You won't find out any of that information until after your bid is accepted, and at that point your credit card is billed. There are no refunds, no changes, no cancellations. And any cheap airline fares ticket you buy is not valid for frequent flyer miles. But don't worry. Chances are your bid will be rejected. In the first three months of the year, Priceline accepted only 186,000 bids, or fewer than one for every eight it received. The reason is simple enough: Priceline collects the difference, the spread, between the customer's named price and the fare charged by the airline. In other words, Priceline is a middleman, just like a travel agent. To be fair, Priceline encourages customers to research airfares before making a bid. And it warns that any bid more than 30 percent below the lowest available cheap airline fares - what it calls "fantasy offers" - probably will not be accepted. In the first three months of the year, two-thirds of Priceline's customers made realistic bids, up from half a year ago. Even so, the number of reasonable bids accepted stayed the same as last year, about 24 percent. Priceline's rules say you can't bid on the same itinerary if your first bid is rejected. But my co-worker, who initially bid $150 for his Seattle ticket, bid again at $200 and finally $250 without any problems. So why would any airline use Priceline at all? "It's another distribution channel," said George Wozniak, president of Hobbit Travel. Priceline has established a brand identity on the Internet, and it draws heavy customer traffic. Airlines figure that if there's a chance to add incremental revenue, they might as well take it. Can't find what you need? Try a Google Web Search in the box below!
Still, Priceline does not have agreements with American, United, or US Airways. Its agreement with Delta, its largest shareholder, gives that carrier the right to veto other carriers or other routes. In the past, Delta has said Priceline accounts for about 2,500 bookings a day, out of a daily unsold inventory of about 100,000 seats. Northwest is a participant, but Minnesotans shouldn't expect to find themselves bidding for many NWA flights out of the Twin Cities, Detroit or Memphis. Northwest carries 70 percent or more of the traffic out of its hubs and has little incentive to offer cheap airline fares in those markets. But with online, leisure travel bookings expected to grow from $3.1 billion in 1998 to more than $29 billion in 2003, Priceline has become the fastest-growing merchant on the Web and one of the hottest stocks on Wall Street - faster and hotter than the king of electronic commerce on the Internet, Amazon.com. But the two sites couldn't be more different in their approach to customers. Amazon offers consumers a friendly, secure place to spend money online. What you see is what you get. At Priceline you're never sure exactly what you're getting until after you've paid for it..... Compare cheap airline fares then make a bid here /cheap airfares home |