Priceline.com Releases Its 2009 List Of The Best Days To Fly For The Holidays, Updates Average Holiday Airfare Data

Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) released today its annual list of the Best Days To Fly for the 2009 Thanksgiving and December holidays. Priceline.com also reported today that average holiday airfares for Thanksgiving and the December holidays are getting more expensive.

As of last week, the average published price of a round-trip airline ticket home for Thanksgiving was $387, about 12% higher than a year ago. The average price of a round-trip ticket for the December holiday period was approximately $435, a 10% increase over a year ago. Average fares are based on all published-price round-trip tickets booked last week by priceline.com customers for travel during the holiday periods.

"In October, when we first looked at holiday airfares, we found that they were averaging 10% lower than a year ago,” said priceline.com’s Travel Ekspert Brian Ek. "Now, with the reduced seat capacity at many major airlines and holiday ticket demand starting to peak, fares are moving up. We believe that travelers looking for holiday airfare deals should lock in their tickets as soon as possible.”

Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving, priceline.com customers generally are finding:

• For the lowest fares, try to travel on November 23, 26 (Thanksgiving Day), 27 and 30.
• For average-priced fares, try to travel on November 21, 22, 24 and 28.
• Consumers can expect to pay the highest fares if they travel on November 20, 25 and 29.

December Holidays

For the December holidays, priceline.com customers generally are finding:

• For the lowest fares, try to travel on December 22, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31 and January 5.
• For average-priced fares, try to travel on December 16, 20, 21, 23, 27, 30 and January 1.
• Consumers can expect to pay the highest fares if they travel on December 17, 18, 19 and January 2, 3 and 4.

To see the best travel days and sample airfares for specific itineraries, check out priceline.com’s customized Best Days To Fly Calendar at www.priceline.com/flights. Choose a departing city and arrival city to see a Best Days To Fly calendar customized for that market showing comparative sample airfares departing on each day during the holiday season.

Priceline.com’s travel blog, The Travel Ekspert www.priceline.com/travelblog/ also features a weekly holiday airfare index, which is published on Tuesdays and tracks the 30 holiday itineraries where airfares have increased or decreased the most from the prior week. The blog also tracks what’s happening to average airfares for Thanksgiving and December holidays.

Priceline.com’s Travel Ekspert also offered some additional money-saving advice for holiday air travelers:

• Pick times of the day that are normally less busy. Time of day is important. Travelers will find the most affordable seats departing early in the morning (5-7 a.m.) or late evening (after 8 p.m.). Mid-day (11 a.m. – 4 p.m.) is a bit more expensive, but still reasonable. Most expensive are the peak business travel hours (8-10 a.m. and 5-7 p.m.).
• Use priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price® airline tickets service. Travelers can save even more on their airline tickets by using priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price® ticketing service. Visit www.priceline.com/flights and click on the link to use priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price® airline tickets service. For help in deciding when to fly or how to bid for maximum savings, check out priceline.com’s Inside Track www.priceline.com/insidetrack.
• Need a rental car or hotel room with that ticket? Don’t make the relatives drive into that airport madhouse. Customers using priceline.com’s published-price and Name Your Own Price airline tickets service can now add a rental car with a few mouse clicks. Priceline.com doesn’t charge booking fees for its published-price rental cars. And here’s another tip – customers may find they can get a Name Your Own Price airfare/rental car combo for less than the price of a published-price airline ticket.

If Thanksgiving sleeping arrangements include the couch, then get a comfy hotel room using priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price hotel service www.priceline.com/hotels.

About Priceline.com^® Incorporated

Priceline.com Incorporated (Nasdaq: PCLN) www.priceline.com provides online travel services in 29 languages in over 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 also operates the following travel websites: Travelweb.com, Lowestfare.com, RentalCars.com and BreezeNet.com. Priceline.com also licenses its business model to certain independent and international licensees.