Attention Black Friday Shoppers – Priceline.com’s Travel Ekspert Recommends Cities With The Best Thanksgiving Weekend Hotel Deals

Why fight the traffic on the long ride home after spending Black Friday (November 27) battling the store crowds in search of holiday gift bargains? Today, priceline.com’s (Nasdaq: PCLN) Travel Ekspert, Brian Ek, offered his picks for major cities with the best Name Your Own Price® hotel deals for Thanksgiving weekend.

Ek made his picks for the upcoming shopping weekend based on hotel room availability and median Name Your Own Price® hotel savings for all hotel star levels in major cities around the country. "My top picks are Orange County, with 46% savings and ample availability, followed by Atlanta, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, each with 45% median Name Your Own Price® savings and solid room availability for the holiday weekend,” said Ek.

Ek continued, "As expected, traditional big shopping cities for the Black Friday weekend, like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, offer significant hotel savings, but room availability is going to be tight. The same holds true for getaway cities like Las Vegas and New Orleans. For these cities, I recommend being as flexible as possible in your star level selection to maximize your chances of getting a room at a bargain price.”

Here’s a roundup of the median Name Your Own Price® hotel savings for major cities around the country:

New York City (36%), Las Vegas (48%), Chicago (47%), New Orleans (47%), San Francisco (36%), San Diego (41%), Miami (40%), Fort Lauderdale (45%), Boston (40%), Washington, DC (40%), Minneapolis/St. Paul (41%).

Priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price® hotel service www.priceline.com/hotels/ is easy to use. Travelers choose the city and neighborhood they want, the star level hotel, the dates and the price they want to pay. Priceline.com’s Winning Bids map http://tickets.priceline.com/promo/nyop_hotels.asp displays successful bids made by other priceline.com customers in cities around the country. Once a bid is entered, priceline.com works to try to find a hotel willing to accept that price. Customers find out instantly whether their bid was successful and which hotel they’ll be staying at.

Travelers with an iPhone or iPodTouch can bid for hotel rooms using a new free app called Hotel Negotiator, available at the App Store. Click here to see the demo video featuring William Shatner http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhn5N7xcFOw.

About Priceline.com^® Incorporated

Priceline.com Incorporated (Nasdaq: PCLN) www.priceline.com provides online travel services in 29 languages in 78 countries in Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Included in the priceline.com family of companies is Booking.com, a leading international online hotel reservation service, priceline.com, a leading U.S. online travel service for value-conscious leisure travelers, and Agoda.com, an Asian online hotel reservation service. Priceline.com believes that Booking.com is Europe’s largest and fastest growing hotel reservation service, with a network of affiliated Web sites. Booking.com operates in over 70 countries in 24 languages and offers its customers access to over 73,000 participating hotels worldwide.

In the U.S., priceline.com gives customers more ways to save on their airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, vacation packages and cruises than any other Internet travel service. In addition to getting great published prices, leisure travelers can narrow their searches using priceline.com’s TripFilter advanced search technology, customize their search activity through priceline.com’s Inside Track features, create packages to save even more money, and take advantage of priceline.com’s famous Name Your Own Price® service, which can deliver the lowest prices available. Priceline.com operates the following travel websites: Travelweb.com, Lowestfare.com, RentalCars.com and BreezeNet.com. Priceline.com also licenses its business model to independent licensees.