Priceline introduces personal travel widget

March 25, 2008 |

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Priceline.com launch My Deals, a personal widget that appears on the priceline.com home page and displays customized travel deals and offers based on an individual?s upcoming trip plans and personal travel preferences.

?My Deals delivers the kind of recommendations-rich personalized shopping experience that customers expect from the more sophisticated online shopping sites,? said priceline.com?s Chief Marketing Officer Brett Keller. ?My Deals provides a real advantage for the customer because, even after a customer leaves the priceline.com Web site, My Deals keeps working, looking for money-saving deals that should be of interest.?

A widget typically is a mini-computer program embedded in a Web site that produces non-static and often personalized content. A key benefit of My Deals is that it requires no computer expertise on the part of a customer to set it up or manage it. When a customer visits priceline.com and does a search for any travel product, priceline.com will automatically create a My Deals box that will appear in the lower right-hand corner of the priceline.com home page on the customer?s next visit.

My Deals is the third piece of Web 2.0-style functionality introduced recently by priceline.com. In February, the company rolled out priceline.mobi, a new mobile service that lets customers with Web-enabled wireless devices search for hotel rooms, check flight status and view restaurant and attraction ratings from Zagat Survey LLC. Last week, priceline launched Inside Track, a personal ticket scout that combs through thousands of flights and fares, both for now and in the future, to find customers the best possible deals for the trips they want to take.

Key features of the new My Deals widget include:

- Personalized travel deals and recommendations. Depending on where a customer lives, or the past purchases or product searches for upcoming trips they have made, the My Deals widget will present an individualized set of priceline.com?s best travel deals to places the customer might like to go.

- Complementary travel deals for upcoming priceline.com trips. Customers who purchase one part of a trip, such as an airline ticket, can receive deeply discounted offers for complementary travel add-ons like hotel rooms and rental cars.

By clicking the My Profile link in the upper right hand corner of the priceline.com home page, customers can follow easy directions that will instruct the My Deals widget to recommend deals for other destinations that might interest them. For airline tickets, if prices drop for the trips a customer is tracking, the customer will receive a notice of the price drop.

- Private rewards program. Customers who are registered in priceline.com?s private rewards program also will receive surprise bonus cash that can be applied toward future priceline.com purchases as well as private last-minute PriceBreakers travel deal offers and access to a winners board where they can check out successful Name Your Own Price? hotel room offers made by other priceline.com customers.

In addition to the My Deals widget, priceline.com announced today the introduction of a new Search History feature that automatically stores and retrieves recent airline ticket, hotel room, rental car and vacation package searches for quick reference. Also, customers can quickly review all of the hotels they?ve viewed as part of a recent trip search.