Priceline.com now finds good airfares and hotel room rates

Priceline.com used to be an exotic service meant only for the adventurous traveler, those willing to accept the risk of a 6am flight or a surburban hotel. By featuring its bidding process , Priceline.com came up with amazingly low air or hotel rates, but at the cost of sometimes getting a dawn departure, a multi-stop flight, or a horribly located hotel.

That's now changed. Priceline.com still maintains its "name your own price" option to get super low rates, but now also features the same full-disclosure airfares and hotel rates that websites like Hotelscombined.com, Hotels.com, Expedia.com, CheapTickets, Orbitz.com, Kayak.com, and others can offer.

Now, Priceline.com often manage to undercut the prices offered by other aggregator websites. Moreover, it doesn't charge the same extra fees that those other websites often impose. So now, if you're looking for the best price possible for cheap airfare or budget hotel rooms, you'll have to check Priceline as well as other aggregator sites.

And if you're looking for a stunning price you can still use the "name your own price" feature of Priceline.com. Bidding for a bargain rate can still lead to outstanding savings.

The slowdown in travel has returned the appearance of top, last-minute airfare deals on Priceline.com, for people willing to take a chance. Apparently, the airlines are now once again and heavily using Priceline.com to dispose of their last-minute unsold seats-of which there are a great many.

But the big news with Priceline.com is that it has also become a standard, full-disclosure search engine for airfares and hotel rates outside the United States as well as domestically. Priceline.com recently acquired the European hotel search engine Booking.com, so if you're looking for a deal on a European hotel, you now also go to Booking.com in addition to Hotelscombined.com.