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Priceline opens up; Quikbook goes opaque

March 10, 2010 | Online Travel

For a short time, Priceline - one of the two major "opaque" booking sites - is posting current and recent successful bid prices for hotel accommodations. Going the other way, a formerly "transparent" site, Quikbook, has added "opaque" booking features

For at least a few weeks, Priceline will be posting recent successful bids, showing specific dollar “savings” but not the names of the hotels. When I checked, I found winning bid data for lots of locations, including some pretty small towns. And the site showed plenty of good buys in the more popular visitor centers. Samples include a four-star hotel near a major attraction in Orlando for $80 per night, a four-star hotel near the Las Vegas Convention Center for $60 (Priceline says 68 percent off), and three-star hotels in several Manhattan neighborhoods at $100.

On average, Priceline claims that more than 40 percent of its customers got hotel rates at least 50 percent below the hotels’ official asking prices. On the whole, my impression is that the claim is probably reasonable. The last time I used Priceline, I got a hotel room in New York City for half the rates quoted by the big online travel agencies.

Going the other direction, longtime hotel discount player Quikbook has added a few opaque listings. So far, choices are extremely limited: two hotels in Chicago, three in New York, and one in Washington.

Get the full story at the Orlando Sentinel

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