Priceline Expands Options to County Hotels

Priceline.com, an online business that lets travelers propose their own prices for airline seats, has a new hotel-booking service with a glut of lower-priced Orange County lodging.

Travelers bid over the Internet on two- to five-star rooms without knowing the names of hotels. If a hotel agrees to a rate and date, the room is booked. Rooms that otherwise would sit empty can be filled at cut rates without hotels having to post prices publicly, Priceline spokesman Brian Ek said. To give users some clue about prices, Priceline posts prevailing room rates for each region it serves.

Of those 26 areas, Orange County had by far the greatest number of two-star rooms available: 50,893 per month. In second place was New York, with 11,287. As defined by Priceline, two-star rooms typically have TVs but no swimming pools available. Posted prices in Orange County run in the $71-$88 range, Priceline said.

At the top end of the scale, Phoenix had the most five-star rooms, 11,550 per month, followed again by New York at 3,286. Priceline had no Orange County rooms available at this super-luxury level, or for that matter in the luxury four-star range.

A caveat: In addition to not knowing the name of their hotel in advance, travelers may be surprised by how geographic regions are defined. Priceline’s Orange County area, for example, includes portions of Pomona, in Los Angeles County, and Ontario, in San Bernardino County.

Priceline’s initial business, the airline-booking service introduced in April, is up to 1,000 seats a day, Ek said. The company’s Internet site is at https://www.priceline.com.