Priceline makes its mark in Europe with remodelled new website – priceline.co.uk

Thanks to its unique Name Your Own PriceTM (NYOPTM) feature, priceline.co.uk has been helping travellers to look and book for less since its launch in 2000. Established in the United States in 1998, NYOPTM allows customers to submit a bid for a hotel room, airline ticket or rental car. Based on the customer request (e.g. a 4 star hotel in Amsterdam for £50 per night), Priceline then searches for a supplier willing to accept the offer and the customer agrees to accept whichever supplier meets the bid and specified criteria and therefore gets a great deal.

While NYOPTM offers the lowest prices available, priceline.co.uk has undergone a facelift and introduced a whole host of new features. The site now displays over 11,000 hotels across Europe that can be booked independently of the NYOP product, from bed & breakfasts to 5 star-hotels, independents to chain hotels and with exceptional coverage in both key cities and regional areas.

priceline.co.uk also includes a brand new innovative feature called PillowTalkTM – a ‘word cloud’ that displays words of different sizes according to how many times they have been mentioned by customer reviews. These words are taken from over 300,000 reviews submitted by genuine guests who have booked and stayed at a hotel through Priceline, thus helping future customers to quickly identify the right property to suit them.

For customers searching for hotels within a specified budget, priceline.co.uk displays a price filter called ‘My budget is’. The site also gives customers a ‘best price promise’, offering to refund 100% of the difference if a lower price is found elsewhere for a similar room within the same hotel on the same dates.

Luke Errington, head of B2C marketing for Priceline Europe says: “Following in-depth usability testing and research, we’ve re-launched Priceline.co.uk to combine our extensive and varied choice of European hotels with guest reviews and innovative features; providing today’s price-conscious traveller with a new, fast and unbiased way to choose the right hotel for their budget.”

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About Priceline Europe
Priceline Europe is one of Europe’s leading online hotel reservations companies, processing over 5 million room-nights a year for a transaction value in excess of €450 M. It enjoys one of the highest organic growth rates in the industry with over 75% growth between Q3 2004 and Q3 2005.

Priceline Europe consists of Active Hotels Ltd (headquartered in Cambridge, UK) and Bookings BV (headquartered in Amsterdam, NL), both subsidiaries of priceline.com (NASDAQ PCLN). The companies together work with approximately 20,000 hotels in 40 European countries and have 11 offices across Europe, in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Cambridge, Dublin, London, Loulé, Paris, Pisa, Rome and Vienna.

Priceline Europe operates the following websites: www.activehotels.com, www.bookings.net, www.priceline.co.uk, which are available in up to 12 languages and include over 500,000 reviews of European hotels.

Media Relations
Mandy Zakhour, Priceline Europe
[email protected], tel: +44 (0)20 8612 8382