Looking to boost its Name Your Own Price business and revenue for participating hotels, Priceline added email alerts for winning hotel bids.
Users can pick cities they want to stay in, select the neighborhoods of those cities they want to monitor, choose the hotel star level and then enter a winning bid price to monitor.
So, for example, you can choose New York City, Midtown East and Times Square, for $95.
Without actually making a bid yourself, you've set up hotel winning bid alerts, and Priceline pledges to email you alerts when someone has won a bid at that rate or lower.
Once you receive an alert, Priceline encourages you to bid for a hotel stay soon thereafter to see if you can get a similar winning bid.
Priceline already publishes winning bids on its website, and the email service will make it easier for customers who don't want to keep returning to the website to check them, says spokesman Brian Ek.
He cautions that the hotel winning bids alerts emailed to customers may not be for the dates the traveler has in mind.
"That bid may or may not be for the same dates you wanted, so there’s still no guarantee it will work," Ek says. "But it gives you a general idea of the potential savings, which is especially good for first-time customers who don’t have a good idea of how much savings they can get."
To help first-time customers, Priceline also introduced live chat in the winter of 2010 to answer questions about the bidding process in the Name Your Own Price service, where you bid for a hotel without knowing the brand or precise location of the hotel up-front.