Priceline.com is eliminating
airline ticket booking fees on all published domestic and
international fares. This means that, in most cases, priceline.com
customers will pay less for their tickets than they would at other
major full-service online travel reservation services, including
Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz.

  The booking fee elimination applies to all priceline.com tickets
purchased on a published-price basis and does not apply to
priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price(R) airline ticketing service,
which already delivers some of the deepest discounts among the
so-called opaque ticketing services. In a recent internal study of the
top 100 customer searches for domestic airline tickets, priceline.com
had a Name Your Own Price(R) fare available for purchase significantly
more often than the other opaque airline tickets service. In those
cases where both services had an opaque fare available, priceline.com
had the lower all-in price approximately 90% of the time.

  “Today’s announcement reinforces priceline.com’s brand position as
the online travel service with the best deals,” said priceline.com
President and Chief Executive Officer Jeffery H. Boyd. “We already
offer consumers an easy, one-stop way to do comparative ticket
searches for most popular airlines, flights and prices. With our new
no-booking-fee policy, priceline.com customers can get the best
possible price on their tickets no matter which flight they choose.”
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