by Wayne Ramsey

Created on: April 04, 2007   Last Updated: April 05, 2007

Priceline is probably the most well known of all of the travel companies online. They have more commercials and a much longer history than a great deal of the other companies. Plus, they have a very different business model than their competitors as well. It is because of this, that Priceline is able to set themselves apart from the other companies.

Rather than just allowing you to search for you tickets, once you find them, Priceline allows you to name your own price for those tickets. Once you name your price, you submit it and Priceline will email you back letting you know if they approved your price or not. While realistically their pricing is no better than what anyone else offers, it's a gimmick that has been working for them for about a decade now and I'm sure they aren't going to give up on it anytime soon.

The major issue that I have with Priceline is that they don't make the site easy to browse. You can't really just browse their prices without inputting all of your information. This of course is their way of hooking you into buying tickets on the sites. I guess they figure if you've already done that much work, you might as well just finish it off at Priceline and buy the tickets, even if they are slightly more expensive. Apparently however, this method has been working for them, because they don't appear to be close to losing their crown as the big dog in the industry anytime soon.

The search features on the site, are just like that of any other travel site, which allows for easy use, since most everyone is already familiar with this search functionality from other uses throughout other sites.

The nice thing about Priceline is that they allow you to purchase not only tickets for your planes, your hotel, and your rental car, but they also allow for you to purchase tickets for the different attractions that you plan on hitting while you are at your destination. This is especially useful if you are planning a trip to Disneyworld. In fact, the pricing on Priceline is great if you are looking to purchase these types of tickets. But it gets even better, because if you purchase everything through priceline or if you purchase several items at the same time, you will receive a nice sized discount on the overall price of your trip. This of course, is a major benefit of using the site in itself.

Another cool feature of the site is their "price breakers" area, where they feature the best pricing that they can offer on certain tickets, flights, hotels, packages, whatever. This area while somewhat difficult to navigate, highlights prices that are incredibly low even by their standards. So because of this you can get some truly unbelievable rates if you want to be a little more adventurous and give some of those locations a try. And if you want to know about them, you can even have them emailed to you or added to your google start page. I personally have found this to be quite convenient and it has aided me in finding some great pricing that I wouldn't have found otherwise.

Overall the site offers great prices, but makes it relatively difficult to actually go through the motions and find out a price. The problem is that by the time you are done setting up your entire count just to see the pricing, you might as well just purchase the tickets. Which this is a great sales ploy for Priceline, it is hugely inconvenient to consumers, but if you want a great price, that's just what you have to deal with. But even with all of that, priceline is still one of the better online travel companies.

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