I’ve written extensively about how bad it is to book travel through Expedia. Their customer service is worse than you think, even if you go in expecting it to be bad.
I don’t write very much about booking travel with Priceline. I don’t like dealing with Expedia on changes and when things go wrong. But for simple bookings that most travelers might make, is Priceline actually worse?
Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention but here’s an itinerary where basic economy actually prices out as more expensive than regular economy. Great, the play here is not to have Delta’s basic economy restrictions. Plus, you’ll actually earn SkyMiles for the trip.
Except that Priceline recommends basic economy here because it seems to be programmed to tell you that the thing that’s a little more expensive is better?
As if it wasn’t bad enough that they’re leading the casual traveler astray, after jumping through the hoop of realizing that avoiding basic economy and still saving money is the better deal, and going to choose your seats Priceline charges you for free seats. Here’s a seat that the airline is offering to assign without extra charge but they add a convenience fee to assign it.
There are reasons to book tickets through an online travel agency. You may earn rewards. Sometimes you’ll luck out and see inventory that’s not available booking direct.
At the same time you’ll almost invariably get worse customer service than dealing with an airline directly. A travel agent is supposed to be your advocate, not an impediment, but with online travel agencies who make money by driving down the cost of servicing a ticket (underinvesting in customer service) it’s often a game of telephone with two cups and a strike between you and the airline with the agency in the middle.
But still I didn’t realize that Priceline was so bad that it’s recommending customers spend more money to book basic economy tickets, and charging for free seat assignments. That’s just horrible.
Priceline acquired Booking.com for $135 million in 2005 in what is certainly one of the most profitable corporate acquisition deals in history. Now the company itself is named Booking Holdings, and Priceline no longer makes its money on bidding for travel. Instead, that’s the engine behind the company’s overall $120 billion valuation. But they’re clearly not in the business of providing good travel guidance to consumers, or even offering them the best deal. Surely 93-year old William Shatner is shedding a tear.
Why would Basic Economy be cheaper than “regular” economy anyway?
@Daniel – unusual, for sure! But pricing anomalies happen all the time
The convenience fee for a free seat (actually even for a paid seat) is highway robbery.
The “recommended” basic economy is an honest oversight. Some product manager and some software engineer decided the mid-priced option would be recommended. Nothing wrong with that IMO. As a general (emphasis on general) rule of thumb, when buying almost anything, you want to avoid the absolute cheapest offering. This is especially true when the absolute cheapest is used to anchor a “starting at” price in advertising copy.
How is it not fraud to charge a fee for a free seat when said fee is not disclosed in prominent text in the booking channel? This is as bad as the Buy My Trip and other scam OTAs that sadly come up in Google Flights.
A seven weeks ago I had to use Expedia to book AirAsia tickets because AirAsia wouldn’t accept any of my credit cards. Everything went fine for the trip. I didn’t pay any seat fees and was assigned an aisle seat both ways. I maybe used Priceline once or twice many years ago. I do not remember if I did but if I did, it wasn’t horrible because I would have remembered that.
Soon you may not earn any airline loyalty miles booking with OTAs if I interpreted AAs recent announcement correctly.
I worked for a major airline for many years. I always felt bad when I had to refer customers back to online travel agencies for assistance because I knew the level of service they got was subpar at best. Often enough they’d already tried to get help. But since we had not sold the ticket – unless it was day of travel issues – we were unable to assist. The tradeoff for cheaper 3rd party tickets is dealing with the 3rd party when you need help. It’s a risk I won’t ever take.
The key is to use Priceline as a search engine and then go directly to the airlines website. You won’t have any bc that way and you will find that Priceline jacks the price up $2-4 more than the original price. All in the name of arranging travel for what you’re able to do yourself.
*******
I do like the DHS article about what the profile practices. This is the anti- heterosexual agenda of the government. It’s all about pushing the homosexual agenda. The biblical narrative shows that people will have a reprobate mindset.
I hang out in DC and I haven’t seen lots of tattoos but I don’t go examine people.
But since we had not sold the ticket – unless it was day of travel issues – we were unable to assist. The tradeoff for cheaper 3rd party tickets is dealing with the 3rd party when you need help. It’s a risk I won’t ever take.
This is why I always book a one way ticket because you guys mess up my reservation and have power over my reservation and the end result is that I am not “disadvantaged” by elimination of the right word you probably can’t post here. F
I just learned that Priceline got rid of the name your price feature for hotels and airfare years ago. Years ago, I used that feature for hotels possibly twice. It wasn’t very useful except for small towns where there weren’t many hotels so one could guess some of the possible hotels used.
Best place to buy hotel rooms if you are looking for a rock-bottom deal!
After having used priceline, expedia, kayak, chase travel portal, capital one travel portal, ita matrix, other smaller sites, and airlines’ own website, I now used priceline for most of my flight booking. In all fairness, other booking sites do work, but often their ticket changes and cancellation process are so painful, wait time so long for human service, or fees so exorbitant that it is not worth the hassle.
Auto slash steers here. I’ve had decent results on Budget via Priceline. I won’t go with some they offer.
I only use it on cars.
Many of the other OTA’s use Priceline as their back end. My daughter often uses “Tickets-at-Work”, a booking engine for state and local government employees, as she works for county government. The prices for hotels are outstanding. Prices for rental cars are often good, although Costco Travel is often better. But the booking engine and servicing for Tickets-at-Work is Priceline.
If you want multiple carriers that are not alliance, OTA can book them for you like a live AAA agent. I have in the past wanted specific times and airlines.
I started minimizing my use of Priceline years ago, and my use of it for airfare was rather negligible well before that. But even into last year, there were some situations where Priceline was the best place for me to quickly book domestic air travel in some less developed countries where the desired airlines websites would repeatedly reject each and every US credit card which I tried to use.
Have not used Priceline in 15 years. Enough said!!
I think by now everyone knows you’re generally better off booking directly with the airline that’s flying you (which doesn’t include their partner airline!) whenever you can. But even the airline websites can be overly complicated and steer you wrong. Like I recently helped a family member book a coach ticket to Europe on United. The United website steers you away from their basic economy fare, telling you that you won’t get a seat assignment or a checked bag if you book that way. But if you go through the whole process, you learn that you can still buy a checked bag with basic economy, and the only available included seat assignment with the higher fare may be the absolutely worst seats on the airplane (in which case you might as well get randomly assigned, possibly to premium seats). In those situations, basic economy is actually the better choice for almost anyone.
Priceline is only useful for booking cars. Because you can stack going through a Cashback portal AND still use your corporate ID. Using a corporate ID usually disqualifies cashback and miles earning.
But flights and hotels, absolutely not. It amazes me Priceline still makes money off these considering how (NOTORIOUSLY) bad their customer service is.
Has nobody noticed that they state that dl comfort plus, which is just extra legroom, is marketed as “premium economy”? Lol
@ Scott — All offerings by Delta are “Premium.”
I had a covid-cancelled flight on Fiji Airways and hotel booked through Priceline. Couldn’t get a refund or talk to a real person, possibly because they were swamped with cancellations back then. Just a recording saying that if you are not flying in the next week, pls call back. Lost the money on the hotel. Fiji Airways eventually gave me credit for the flight, but by the time I used the credit, the price almost doubled. Before that incident, I had used Priceline occasionally for flights, but mostly for hotels and cars, where their pricing was pretty good. Now, I don’t use them at all.
Who uses Priceline, anyway? There are other sites that are cheaper and more reliable and that are easily found. I wonder who uses Priceline except to criticize it.