By A pair of app launches sees the traveler in everyone getting excited. First up, Prceline.com is bringing their Hotel Negotiator application out that allows you to bid on hotel rooms and allows you to book rooms on the same day right for your phone, a perfect feature for someone who would be using this on the go and would need to get a room situated in a jiffy. Here are some of the features you can expect upon downloading:
- Winning Bids recommendations. Choose a city and Hotel Negotiator displays multiple recent winning bids made by other priceline.com customers for hotels in different parts of the city at different star levels.
- Shake-Down geo-locator-triggered hotel search. Shaking the device establishes your location using location-based features and then performs a Winning Bids search for hotels in the surrounding areas.
- Instant Bid Results. You’ll know instantly whether your bid is accepted. If it is, you’ll immediately receive all the details on your hotel and its location.
- Two booking options. If you’re using priceline.com’s Name Your Own Price® hotel service, you can enter your bid using your Android. For published-price hotel rooms, you can book the room with your device or by calling Priceline’s hotel booking specialists.
Not to be left out, Orbitz also brings their Android app to the market, but you’ll get the whole shebang, here, instead of just the hotel booking. Need a flight? Book it. Need a plane? It can do that too. Hotels? Pssh.
- Make reservations: Book flights, hotels and rental cars quickly – even for last minute, same-day reservations. Just like our Orbitz.com website, access a broad selection of thousands of hotels, airlines, and car rental options.
- View your trips: Access itineraries anytime, anywhere.
- Stay in the know, on the go: Check flight status, gate and baggage claim details or search via your app for available hotels near your current location automatically.
It might actually be more accurate to say that Orbitz is competing with Kayak more than they’re competing with Priceline. We can’t imagine Priceline will leave their other booking services off of the Android market for too long, but for now, they’re currently on the lower end of the totem pole. Who will you use?
Too bad Orbitz doesn’t guarantee a room if they double book you.
They just issue you a refund in 5 days and you are stuck in the middle of nowhere without a place to sleep.
Don’t order from Orbitz. They don’t stand behind their product!
Orbitz crashed on me, I had to force-close it. It was slow and didn’t even supply the fare class so I could see if I would get FF mileage. Nice try, but they ain’t there yet.
Other gripes – wouldn’t navigate with trackpad properly, didn’t highlight pressed items well enough (uses a faint blue) and generally hard to use.
Priceline negotiator didn’t crash on me, seems well designed. Didn’t find me a deal any better than I could get on the hotel’s website, but nevertheless was no worse, and much easier to browse with. This one is a keeper.
Oh – and Kayak – I uninstalled that app. The version in the Android Market looked years old, with hardly any of the features now built into their website. If I am going to spend money on an airfare I guess I am going to have to buy the data bandwidth to navigate their webpages…
The Orbitz app is very easy to use. I haven’t had any problems with it yet.