Priceline.com launches new, enhanced hotel reservation service

June 11, 2009 | Online Travel

The service provides a streamlined yet powerful shopping experience that provides comprehensive hotel information, multiple search options and priceline.com’s unique hotel guest scorecard/review program for hotels.

Priceline.com announced today the launch of its new, enhanced hotel reservation service that makes it easier than ever before to find the best hotels and the best deals. The service provides a streamlined yet powerful shopping experience that provides comprehensive hotel information, multiple search options and priceline.com’s unique hotel guest scorecard/review program for hotels.

Key features of priceline.com’s new hotel reservation service include:

- New, comprehensive guest scorecards for hotels. Most hotels now feature a detailed guest scorecard. The scorecard ranks the hotel’s popularity among Priceline hotel guests and shows when a hotel is ranked among the top-rated hotels for a specific city. Also, each hotel receives a guest satisfaction score in 5 different satisfaction categories - overall quality, cleanliness, staff, location and dining. Unlike other hotel review services that allow anyone to post a review, the priceline.com scorecards are based on surveys that priceline.com hotel guests receive after they’ve completed their stay.

- Enhanced guest hotel reviews and exclusive Zagat reviews and ratings. Now, guest hotel reviews can be sorted and grouped according to 7 different traveler types - solo travelers, groups, seniors, couples, families with teens, families with young children and business travelers. This gives potential hotel guests the ability to search their hotels through the eyes and experiences of like-minded travelers. Priceline.com also offers exclusive hotel and restaurant ratings and reviews from Zagat Survey, LLC.

- Similar hotels. We’ve made narrowing your hotel choices more convenient and quicker. Now, for each hotel, priceline.com also suggests similar popular hotels you might want to consider. This allows hotel shoppers to compare hotels and choose the one that’s right for them.

- Expanded Winning Bids feature. Priceline.com’s successful Winning Bids feature just got a lot bigger and has been expanded to include hundreds of cities around the world. As visitors are shopping hotels on priceline.com, they’ll see examples of recent winning bids from Name Your Own Price® hotel guests for specific star-levels across various neighborhoods in that city. Shoppers can find the best published price hotel, or they can bid up to half-off for a room through priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price hotel service.

- 3 different ways to sort and view hotel listings. 1. Map View. “Virtual pushpins” identify the location of hotels, along with road grids, landmarks and other geographic features. The scrollable, zoom-able map is powered by Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. 2. Matrix View. This popular snapshot view lets travelers quickly see what star levels are in different parts of a city and what the different price points are for each star level. One click lets travelers drill down to the full list of available hotels for an area. 3. List View. Travelers can sort hotels in a destination by most popular among priceline.com customers, lowest price and star rating. They also can find a hotel by specific name or find hotels that are close to various landmarks.

- More hotels. With the challenging economy, more and more hotels have decided to offer their rooms through priceline.com. Priceline.com also has given its hotel guests access to tens of thousands of international hotel offerings from its international hotel reservation service, Booking.com. When you add them all up, priceline.com now gives its hotel guests more than 75,000 hotels to choose from, including over 37,000 in Europe and Asia.

- Virtual hotel tours. Many priceline.com hotels now offer visual 360-degree “virtual tours” of their lobbies, public areas, rooms, spas, pool areas and more. In addition, listings feature amenities summaries and descriptions, photos, maps and guides to nearby restaurants and attractions.

- Faster checkout. Priceline.com’s hotel reservation process has been compressed. Type in your room choice and dates and you’ll be taken to a shortened checkout screen that completes your reservation in minutes.

- Name Your Own Price hotel reservation service. Priceline.com’s hotel reservation service wouldn’t be complete without its famous Name Your Own Price® hotel service that lets customers save up to 50% compared to published rates found online. With priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price hotel reservation service, customers receive their specific hotel information after their reservation is completed.

“Priceline.com’s new hotel reservation service enhances our ability to deliver the best hotels and the best deals to our customers,” said priceline.com’s Senior Vice President, Hotels, Tim Gordon. “We have more hotels than ever before. We have more information than ever before. We have a faster, easier reservation process than ever before. What hasn’t changed are the outstanding deals customers will find through our specially negotiated rates, reduced hotel booking fees, no change/cancel fees and, of course, our famous Name Your Own Price savings.”