“Name your price” e-tailer Priceline.com Thursday said
it reached three sales milestones, including achieving $1 million worth of sales on Wednesday.
Priceline said its travel services unit
recorded its first million-dollar sales day for leisure airline tickets on
April 28. Also on the same day, the company sold a record 5,000-plus tickets in a single 24-hour period,
equaling roughly one ticket sold
every 17 seconds, beating the company’s previous one-day record of 4,300
tickets, set last week. In addition, Priceline said that for the first time
the travel service unit sold
more than 25,000 airline tickets in a single seven-day period, up from its
12-month average of selling 6,200 tickets per week.
Previously this week the company announced
other customer metrics for its other
business units. In total, more 1 million unique consumers have used the
Priceline.com service, which allows customers to bid on airline tickets, hotel
rooms and mortgages. The company said it now averages over
300,000 new unique customers a quarter using one or more of priceline.com’s
services.
Priceline.com’s said its hotel room service sold more than 75,000 rooms
since the service launched in late October 1998, and now sells an average of
over 5,000 rooms a week. Last week, the hotel service expanded, covering
over 1,100 cities, town and resorts in 50 states. More than 4,250 brand-name
hotels have signed up with the service to offer unsold rooms.
Priceline.com’s home financing service, launched in the beginning of the
year, received more than 1 million requests by consumers looking to name
their interest rates and terms for a home mortgage, refinancing
or a home equity loan. The service has enabled customers to obtain more than $125
million in approved requests for home financing.
The company’s recently began a trial of car retailing, offered now on a
cash-sales-only
test basis in the New York metro area. Priceline has sold more than $11 million worth of new
cars since the beta test began in the summer of 1998. The service allows
buyers to save on costs by naming their own price for a specific car.
