Looking for a free breakfast, a kids stay free discount or a resort credit?
Priceline introduced Hotel Freebies, a way for users to mine the company’s database of published-price hotels and search for free or discounted hotel offerings by freebie type or city.
Customers can type in a city name, retrieve properties offering freebies and search by freebie type.
The types of freebies include free parking, room upgrades, free nights, kids stay free discounts, resort credits, extras, golf credits and free breakfast.
Freebies are listed in tandem with room rates.
The other way to search for freebies is by freebie type instead of starting with a city search.
Hotel listings come with an availability calendar pointing users to the most likely travel dates when freebies will be available, Priceline says.
Priceline quietly introduced Hotel Freebies last week “after a major development effort,” a spokesman says.
So, after conducting a Hotel Freebie search for Orlando, Fla., hotels, you can see that the Hyatt Regency Orlando Airport hotel is offering a free breakfast, as does the Crowne Plaza Orlando Airport for some room types.
For Orlando, users can narrow their search by selecting filters for instant discounts, free breakfast, hotel extras and resort credits.
And, an ever-updating list of newly negotiated Priceline discounts scrolls by in a right-hand navigation pane, with the words, “Negotiated 3 days ago,” for instance.
Priceline considers itself a venue for value-oriented consumers and Hotel Freebies fits right into its sweet spot.
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They’ve got creative folks at Priceline…
Once again they’re able to take a bit of the sting out of price comparison and use a differntiating twist. However, there should be no problem at all for TSE to follow this lead and enable ‘free’ at their screening options.
But what TSE should really do is follow the example of Truprice and the likes in flights and provide the option for a full price calculation of the hotel cost. The user should be able to define:
Hotel room for 2, Plus parking, Plus breakfast – and get the inclusive price quote before she leaves to the supplier site.