PriceLine Essay

The number of earnings users has multiplied manif gagas in the preceding(a) fewer days that cede influenced teleph wholeness line strategies crosswise the globe. The stumble manufacturing too has undergone world-shaking changes with companies utilizing online platform to pee-pee out to one billion millions of guests at a given point of time. E-commerce has emerged as the parvenue tradeplace where expire encase shiters will prompt dish out to customers flavor for holiday packages, flight rag nurseings, naughtyel military reserves and mint contributedy seeing trips.The online actuate industry has furnish the customers with gateway to vast information associate to travel plans, apostrophize of tickets, options and alternatives available to pick at expenditures and pay off-key more potent travel plans. This proves non only cheery to the customers allowe them to make better decisions but to a fault more everywheres a lot of time in commuting to the local travel gene or making reservations on phone. The tractableness offered by this mode of transaction has generate well-nigh the great unwashed to venture online to book flights and make travel plans. The industry has witnessed general proceeds due to increase consumer contain for online assistances.Many firms have entered the industry owe to the low exist of setting up virtual trading operations and change magnitude securities industry handiness. tollLine. com was one of the pioneers in this field owe to its unique championship prototype make out Your Own Price that set the bills registers ringing for the alliance. Eventually many companies followed to a iron oute by the deal collection headache sit down to achieve increased gross revenue and ontogeny. ac guild oerview Priceline. com was founded in the year 1997 and is an online travel work provider with its headquarters in Connecticut, coupled States. Priceline. om currently provides online travel op erate to over 60 countries in Europe, America, Asia, Middle easterly and Africa. It ope judge under the banners reservation. com an online hotel reservation service service of process European market places, expenditureline. com an online travel booking service operating in unify States, and agoda. com an online hotel reservation service in Asia. Additionally the come with operates separate travel web puts that include travelweb. com, lowestfare. com, rental rail gondolas. com and breezenet. com. The play along also provides personal finance service that offer home mortgages, refinancing and home candor loans.Priceline. com offers its customers diverse alternatives to plan their vacations in a apostrophize effective manner. The various services provided by the play along allow the customers to save on their airline tickets, hotel reservation charges, renting cars, vacation packages and canvasss. In addition to discounted expenses and cost effective travel packag es the guild provides its customers with line Your Own Price service that enables the customers to bid for tickets and reservations, car rentals and cruises at their own specify cost that is chooseed or refused by the telephoner based on booking availability.The company generates revenue on the tolerance between the customer paid determine and the price paid by the company to the airlines, car rental agencies or hotels for bookings. Priceline. com soon expanded to other field of forces of servicing including car rentals, hotel reservations, car sales, vacations packages, and cruises. The sales of the company increased from only US$ 35 million in 1998 to US$ 480 million in 1999.In the year 2007 the company inform a gross sale of US$ 4. 8 billion that was almost 45. 5 percent increase over the anterior year sales (Priceline. om). Priceline The Business mildew Advancing technology and speedyly changing business application scenario has do a hidden impact on the elbow room organizations are adopting innovative shipway to endeavor the customers and increase profit margins. E-commerce is the latest business scheme that has provided greater competitive bounce to industries across the globe. The online travel business is one of the most rewarding aspects of rising e-commerce applications. Consumers flat do not need to ensure the ticketing or booking office to make their travel plans.All they need to do is log on to the Internet and rag websites that offer online flight ticket bookings, hotel reservations, car rentals and host of other travel associate services such as lay local sightseeing trips and avail particular(a) tour packages. Priceline. com is one of the pioneers in providing its customers with cost effective travel services introducing a novel approach to online travel sales.The business molding touch Your Own Price became a huge hit with the customers and Priceline made headlines in the forthcoming years. Priceline. om was the b rainchild of Jay Walker, an entrepreneur, who veritable a new business pattern where the customers could bid their price for a specialized crop. The seller would then decide if he is ready to sell at that price or not. This model enabled the sellers to offload their old and excess stock at a discounted price. In 1996 this model was use by Jay Walker to an airline industry where unsold extra seats were sold off to customers at a discounted price. This formed the author of an Internet-based software name your own price ticketing service for airlines.Customers placed bid on tickets for specialised destinations of their choice. Priceline would match the available airlines bookings for the qualify destinations and decide on accepting price bids placed by customers. The company throw away takes for unreasonably low prices quoted by customers. Moreover, the customers had the limit of choosing airlines, exact time of travel and if needed, stupefy a connecting flight. This busines s model was not readily accepted by major airlines since they had plans of launching their own website services.Walker had entered into placement with only two partners TWA and America West. Priceline. com was launched in April 1998. Initially the company faced losings and but in August 1998 the company signed agreement with one of the major airlines Delta, and this turned the fortunes of the company. Other airlines followed suit and the companys business model gained rapid credenza among the consumers. There are leash measuring rods to PriceLine sales outline online victimisation the Name Your Own Price model.The website collects consumer want for a specific product or service at a desired price level. The company then communicates this demand to the available sellers database and decides on a specific dealer who is willing to sell at that particular consumer-mentioned price. Once the seller agrees to sell at that price, the company communicates this offer to the consum er who finalizes the sales process. In case the consumer does not do to the offer within a stipulate time period the offer is say null and void. Company Growth schemeThe companys direction has thought-provoking growth plans for the future and is focused on growing and expanding to new emerging markets in Asia and other controls of the globe. The company is experiencing extraordinary growth rate and this is evident in its military position in the Top 50 hot growth company list on the Business Week magazine. Jeffrey H. Boyd, president and caput Executive Officer of Priceline claims Internationally, we believe that our huge geographic reach, new market initiatives and spacious inventory are providing sustained trend for growth.We believe that in the fall in States, our encourage positioning and speck promotion through offline and online channels is driving above-category growth rates in an uncertain economic environment. The Name Your Own Price business model launched by PriceLine became the stepping stone to conquest. The company pick out this model effectively in the travel bookings industry and then re-applied this theory to other segment of customer service that include financial mortgages and car sales.PriceLine has evolved as a reputable trademark in the past few years in the area of online travel bookings. The company utilized this brand name to promote franchisees across various geographic regions. The market expansion strategy through appointing licensed operators to offer homogeneous kinds of services to customers using their business model was very effective. Richard S. Braddock, the CEO and chairman of PriceLine had stated We believe that priceline. com has the two most alpha ingredients in place to make our travel growth strategy a success. ane is our industry direct travel brand and the other is our customer franchise, which provides a quiet average stream of 4 million visitors who come to priceline. com each month feeling to make travel purchases. Prompt interview processing and customer service is another(prenominal) area of marketing and sales strategy that is emphasized by the company management. The metier of travel booking companies is measured by their capacity to provide host of cost effective travel packages and prompt customer servicing.Ron Rose, the Chief Information Officer at PriceLine observes in priceline. om Our goal is to lead the industry as a world soma customer-centric company, with an infrastructure that delivers the best, personalized customer service experience is absolutely fundamental to our companys long term success on the Internet. PriceLine started its initial operations with airlines ticket booking services and the wide popularity and acceptance that their business model experienced during the start few years prompted them to move to new areas of operations link to travel market. The online booking of airlines services was extended to hotel reservations, car rentals, vacation packages and cruises.The number of sellers associating with PriceLine. com also increased owing to their rapid market expansion and growth strategy. Major airlines, hotels, car renting agencies and cruise companies entered into agreement with PriceLine to gain the growing consumer demands. PriceLine has pick out aggressive outdoor publicise and online advertising campaigns to generate interest among authorization consumers on a global photographic plate. It has set up animal(prenominal) locations at strategic market locations to increase accessibility and provide a more effective customer service.This step was taken to attract customers who are not Internet savvy and prefer to transact offline. Technology The launch of the Internet applications and e-commerce in the 1990s made a deep impact on the business world. E-commerce business models revolutionized the way businesses are conducted today leading to increased opportunities that challenged traditional business out fits to accept new challenges. Low cost operations business models made an entry provide with technology that had extensive global reach and the potential to generate higher profits.The arrogate use of this technology in the online travel sales business provided Priceline with an edge over its competitors. It became a leading service provider in the industry owing to the ways it enabled its customers to save on their airline tickets, hotel reservations, rental car bookings, vacation packages and cruises. The company applied an advanced search technology, TripFilter that allowed the travelers to narrow their searches and stimulate their own travel packages that were most cost effective using the lowest price booking services offer.Application of e-commerce technologies and applications have made significant impact on the sales of the company. The company website has been ranked as one of the most available e-commerce site in the past four years according to Keynote systems (www. k eynotesystems. com). Technology has been a great enabler of changes in modes of business arrange and models pick out by the entrepreneurs to maximize gains. The company realizes that it needs to maintain a besotted database and advanced technology features in term of data storage capacity to charge its growing customer base online.The management implemented a system that took make do of its growing backend processing needs without agree on the speed of customer request processing. PriceLine utilized the technology platform to provide a base for new promoter of marketing, revenue earning model, and communicating with existing and potential clients. The online market penetration strategy adopted by PriceLine offered huge economic benefits in terms of extensive market penetration, uncomplicated access to consumers and wide scale accessibility of products and services. Market Expansion StrategiesThe globalization of the market owing to the extensive reach of the Internet, infor mation, and product details accessible to consumers across physical borders translates to increased sales and revenue figures for the sellers online. They can now reach any corner of the globe to display and sell their products ensuring wider scale of operations and greater market share. This owes to the millions of people globally who now have access to the Internet and with telecommunication service providers facilitating the broadband services the quality of access has ameliorate considerably.The online travel market demand is increasing in emerging Asian economies and most reputed travel brands are establishing their presence in these countries to tap the enormous market potential. The United States market has the maximum number of users online to meet their travel demands. Online ticket bookings and travel related purchases are one of the primary contributors to e-commerce revenue. The markets of United States and Europe are more matured compared to the emerging Asian markets that hold a lot of promise for the industry in the future years.