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Kill Priceline.com?
Ask Chris · November 2, 2000

In a recent Ticked.com poll, I asked which travel sites you'd most like to see disappear. While the survey is still ongoing, a clear winner has emerged for now: Priceline.com. Why would anyone want to pull the plug on Priceline? I put the follow-up question to the readers of Ticked.com. I'll give them the floor first and then chime in with my own observations:

Q: I think we know why people want Priceline to sink. How about giving us little choice in departure times or the ability to back out when we have too little information? Or better yet, how about giving us a little bit of confidence that Priceline's actually giving us the lowest fare and not just the "lowest possible fare available to them from their preferred list" of carriers?

-- Jeremy French

A: Yeah, how about it? I don't think you're alone in your frustrations, Jeremy. Read on ...

Q: My problems with Priceline.com are:

1. Branching out into a number of areas where they don't really belong (gasoline was one - fortunately they quit that).

2. You have to know what the going rate is for airline tickets before you start. If you don't know what the current fares are then you can really get burned on the request. You have to do research before submitting a bid to Priceline. You have to know what the deep discount fare is before starting.

3. The worst is not getting any choice in the flights. Unfortunately Hotwire.com is using the same model. Once you are committed to Priceline you get whatever flight you are assigned to. That means no choice as to time. I don't care about the airline but I do care about the time of the day. At least they should give you a message that says, "We will accept your bid but you have to leave at 6 a.m., or 10:00 p.m. Are you willing to take one of those flights?" That is quite a differential in time and I believe it should not be that difficult to get a choice like that even if you can't specify the airline.

-- John Unrath

A: Agreed, John. When Priceline.com says you get to "name your own price," then that's really all you get to name. I'm surprised they let you pick where you want to fly to. There's a Saturday Night Live skit in there, somewhere.

Q: One of the reasons people don't like Priceline is the commitment before you know what it is you are actually buying. I bought a ticket from Denver to Los Angeles via Priceline and had to fly at 9 p.m. to Las Vegas then had a three-hour layover and another flight to Ontario airport, which was definitely not my preference. We arrived at our destination at 2 a.m. exhausted and with a one-month old baby.

Needless to say, I would have paid full fare with United to avoid this terrible situation.

-- Pamela Bergeson

A: Now that's what I call torture.

Q: It should somewhat obvious. Those commercials are the most irritating of any that have hit the small screen in ages! They are like the sound of fingernails being drawn down a chalkboard! Sure, there are others that I do not like - I'm not a fan of many commercials. But, this series is obnoxious.

-- M. Carl Gehr

A: Interestingly, yours isn't the only e-mail complaining about the William Shatner commercials. The others were unpublishable. There's been some speculation about whether Priceline might dump Captain Kirk. I'm no ad expert, but I don't think it could hurt.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. Ask Chris appears weekly on this site.