Priceline launched its first iPad app for making hotel room reservations, and this app is squarely targeted at travelers who place high value on location when they book their hotel rooms.
Here's how the app works. After picking a destination, travelers can scroll and see hotels appear on the map in real time. There are four different ways the map can be scrolled:
- Price View. Price points are highlighted on the map and color-coded from red (the highest rate) to blue (the lowest rate). Tap on a rate and full hotel details are shown.
- Star Level View. This view shows all the different hotel star levels and where they're located on the map. Tap on a star and full hotel details are shown.
- Guest Satisfaction Score View. This view displays the actual average satisfaction scores, from 1-10, posted by priceline.com guests for each hotel. Tap on a score to see the full hotel details.
- Name Your Own Price® View. This view will display all the zones in a city where priceline.com has Name Your Own
- Price® hotel partners. Tap on a zone and the app will retrieve actual winning bids made by other customers for different star level hotels in the selected zone.
All of the views can be zoomed in or out. Once app users have selected the hotel, or zone and star level they want, they can use the quick booking feature to get their room, all without leaving the app.
Priceline.com and its sister hotel reservation service, Booking.com, are the only two major online travel agencies to offer pannable real-time hotel mapping and to allow hotel bookings to be made within the iPad app. "Our new iPad app is designed to be an extremely convenient, simple and fast hotel searching and booking tool for a traveler on the go who wants to stay in a particular part of town," said John Caine, priceline.com's Senior Vice President, Marketing.
Priceline also has a popular Hotel & Rental Car Negotiator app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, available for free at the iTunes App Store and a Hotel Negotiator app for Android, available for free at the marketplace.
