Turkey Trumps Santa: Priceline.com Reports That The Average Thanksgiving Airfare This Year Is $80 Less Than An Airline Ticket Home For Christmas

Can’t afford to fly home for Thanksgiving and Christmas this year? Then you may be better off choosing to spend Turkey Day with the folks, according to priceline.com (Nasdaq:PCLN). Based on holiday airfares booked by priceline.com customers between July 1 and October 1, 2009, priceline.com found that the average Thanksgiving airfare this year is $361 – almost $80 less than the average December holidays airfare of $440.

Priceline.com also reported that average airfares for the 2009 Thanksgiving and December holidays are about 10% lower than last year.

One caveat from priceline.com – if you know you’re going home for the holidays, you may not want to wait too long to book your tickets. "Last year, the economy started its freefall right before the holidays and many consumers put their wallets back in their pockets,” said Brian Ek, priceline.com’s Travel Ekspert. "As a result, the airlines ran fare sales right into the holidays to spur demand. This year, we’re not likely to see a repeat. In fact, prices may go up, since seat capacity is even lower this year compared to last year.”

Ek offered some advice for holiday air travelers:

• Use Priceline’s Inside Track to find the holiday travel days and airfare that are right for you. It’s all there at http://www.priceline.com/insidetrack/. The Best Days To Fly Calendar lets travelers plug in cities and see airfares by departure and return date. A scrolling list shows what’s happening to airfares from a designated city to other destinations around the world. Priceline’s Price Drop feature will send an email when fares drop for a desired trip. And travelers can get tips on how to bid using priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price® airline tickets service and what kind of itinerary they’re most likely to get.
• 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.
• 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 http://www.priceline.com/rentalcars/. 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 published-price or Name Your Own Price® hotel service www.priceline.com/hotels. Be sure to try Priceline’s new hotel Price Maps, that help travelers find their perfect hotel by scrolling over interactive city maps that locate and display hotels and published prices or, for Name Your Own Price® hotel fans, recent winning bids for specific neighborhoods throughout a city. Check out http://travela.priceline.com/travelguides/HotelPriceMap/.

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 71,000 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.