Priceline.com took a sampling of more than 30,000 Name-Your-Own Price bids — not necessarily successful ones — and found that downtown New Orleans was the most-sought after destination for the upcoming long weekend, Feb. 12-15, which includes Valentine’s Day Feb. 14 and Presidents’ Day Feb. 15.
Las Vegas took top honors last year in Priceline’s Top 50 Destination’s list.
Priceline’s Brian Ek, editor of Priceline’s Travel Ekspert blog, says New Orleans’ passing of Las Vegas wasn’t too surprising because Mardi Gras, a partying New Orleans tradition, falls on Feb. 16.
Priceline arrives at its Top 50 destinations list not by taking a poll, but by sampling 30,000 consumer offers, a size that Ek claims no other travel company is close to equaling.
“When I set up the methodology about seven years ago, I settled on offers vs. bookings,” Ek says. “If I used bookings, I may be getting where people ended up vs. their first choice (which could happen if choice #1 was sold out). I really wanted to get at which destinations were the most popular overall, and I thought this was a more accurate way of determining that. And the 30,000 was the arbitrary minimum number of offers I wanted them to sample so that the sample space left little conventional margin for error. To date, no one else is using a sample size anywhere near that large.”
The top three destinations for the upcoming Valentine’s Day-Presidents’ Day weekend were New Orleans (downtown), Las Vegas (Strip Vicinity South) and New York City (Chelsea).
In true marketing fashion,the Priceline press release about Top 50 Destinations, which cover global destinations, as well, includes numerous vacation packages, airline ticket, hotel and car rental offers that were available recently on Priceline.com.
So I don’t keep you in suspense, here are the Top 50 Destinations from the travel ekspert blog.
Thanks, Dennis. After 7 years of publishing my lists, you are the 1st journalist to inquire about the methodology. Kudos.
Brian: Thanks, now, how do you arrive at all those winning bids in Name-Your-Own Price……….
Interesting methodology. It might be interesting to see if the list remains the same looking only at first bids. Seeing New York’s Chelsea neighborhood (a zone that lacks 3.5 & 4-star hotels) listed #3 makes me wonder…
Could it have been bumped up artificially by travelers adding it as part of a “free re-bid” strategy for other NYC neighborhoods to get around Priceline’s 24-hour failed bid embargo?
Regardless, I really like the approach of looking for measures of true travel demand (before budgets and logistics start destroying dreams…)
As a consumer, I’ve always been a big Priceline fan, but Shatner still gives me the hee-bee-gee-bees… I think it has something to do with hearing him sing many years ago…
Robert: Yes, the methodology intrigued me. Much better than an online poll. Perhaps the Ekspert will shed some light on first and second bids.
I like Shatner as a spokesman a lot. Singing aside.
After all, he’s not made of ceramic http://bit.ly/9HAUqB — if you know what I mean.