NORWALK, Conn. - (Business Wire) Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) released today its annual Best Days To Fly Calendar for the 2008 Thanksgiving and December holidays, and advised air travelers to lock in their tickets and prices as soon as possible. This year, priceline.com is offering a customizable calendar that will let travelers see best travel days and sample prices personalized for the trips they want to take.
Currently, the average published price of a round-trip airline ticket home for Thanksgiving is running between $245 and $350. The average price of a round-trip ticket for the December holiday period is running between $285 and $400. Average fares are based on all published-price round-trip tickets sold to priceline.com customers from January 1 – October 27, 2008 for outbound travel before each holiday and return travel after each holiday.
Thanksgiving
For Thanksgiving, priceline.com customers generally are finding:
- For the lowest fares, try to travel on November 23, 24 and 27 (Thanksgiving morning).
- For average-priced fares, try to travel on November 22 and 25.
- Consumers can expect to pay the highest fares if they travel on November 21 and 26.
December Holidays
For the December holidays, priceline.com customers generally are finding:
- For the lowest fares, try to travel on December 22, 23 and 24.
- For average-priced fares, try to travel on December 17, 18, 21, 26, and 30, and January 1 and 2.
- Consumers can expect to pay the highest fares if they travel on December 19, 20 and 28, and January 3 and 4.
To see the best travel days and sample airfares for specific air routes, check out priceline.com’s customized Best Days To Fly Calendar at www.priceline.com/flights Choose a departing city and arrival city to see a Best Days To Fly calendar customized for that market showing comparative sample airfares departing on each day during the holiday season.
Priceline.com also offered some additional advice for holiday air travelers:
- Buy your tickets now. Travelers who know they’re going to fly over Thanksgiving may be better off purchasing tickets now to get those advance-purchase fares and guarantee their seats. Priceline.com has thousands of tickets available on major domestic and international airlines www.priceline.com/flights. Priceline’s TripFilter technology lets customers see airfares for different airlines all arranged in an easy to follow grid. Priceline.com customers also save because, unlike other airline ticket reservation services, priceline.com doesn’t charge booking fees for its published-price domestic and international fares.
- Pick times of the day that are normally less busy. Time of day is important. Travelers will find the most affordable seats departing early in the morning (5-7 a.m.) or late evening (after 8 p.m.). Mid-day (11 a.m. – 4 p.m.) is a bit more expensive, but still reasonable. Most expensive are the peak business travel hours (8-10 a.m. and 5-7 p.m.).
- Use priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price® airline tickets service. Travelers can save even more on their airline tickets by using priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price® ticketing service. Visit www.priceline.com/flights and click on the link to use priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price® airline tickets service. For help in deciding when to fly or how to bid for maximum savings, check out priceline.com’s Inside Track www.priceline.com/insidetrack.
- Need a rental car or hotel room with that ticket? Don’t make the relatives drive into that airport madhouse. Customers using priceline.com’s published-price and Name Your Own Price airline tickets service can now add a rental car with a few mouse clicks. Priceline.com doesn’t charge booking fees for its published-price rental cars. And here’s another tip – customers may find they can get a Name Your Own Price airfare/rental car combo for less than the price of a published-price airline ticket.
If Thanksgiving sleeping arrangements include the couch, then get a comfy hotel room using priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price hotel service www.priceline.com/hotels.
About Priceline.com(R) Incorporated
Priceline.com Incorporated (Nasdaq: PCLN) www.priceline.com provides online travel services in 22 languages in over 70 countries in Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Included in the priceline.com family of companies is Booking.com, a leading international online hotel reservation service, priceline.com, a leading U.S. online travel service for value-conscious leisure travelers, and Agoda.com, an Asian online hotel reservation service.
Priceline.com believes that Booking.com is Europe’s largest and fastest growing hotel reservation service, with a network of affiliated Web sites. Booking.com operates in over 70 countries in 19 languages and offers its customers access to approximately 57,000 participating hotels worldwide.
In the U.S., priceline.com gives customers more ways to save on their airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, vacation packages and cruises than any other Internet travel service. In addition to getting great published prices, leisure travelers can narrow their searches using priceline.com’s TripFilter advanced search technology, customize their search activity through priceline.com’s Inside Track features, create packages to save even more money, and take advantage of priceline.com’s famous Name Your Own Price® service, which can deliver the lowest prices available.
Priceline.com also operates the following travel websites: Travelweb.com, Lowestfare.com, RentalCars.com and BreezeNet.com. Priceline.com also has a personal finance service that offers home mortgages, refinancing and home equity loans through an independent licensee. Priceline.com licenses its business model to independent licensees, including priceline mortgage and certain international licensees.
Priceline.com
Brian Ek, 203-299-8167
brian.ek@priceline.com
