The company's Travel Services group reported that it sold a single-week record of over 50,000 leisure airline tickets last week. Based on that volume, priceline.com believes that it now accounts for over 2% of all the leisure airline ticket sales in the United States. Last week, priceline.com's airline tickets service hit a single-day sales record of 10,000 tickets. Priceline.com's Travel Services unit achieved these sales milestones after 17 months of operation.
Priceline.com's leisure airline ticket sales record is a nearly ten-fold increase over priceline.com's average weekly ticket sales of 5,000 to 7,000 at the beginning of the year. Yesterday, priceline.com's Travel Services group said that its hotel room service had set two single-week sales records of 15,000 and 16,000 room nights in early September.
Priceline.com's Home Finance group which offers home mortgages, refinancing and home equity loans also set a record, closing $23 million worth of loans in the past 30 days. In addition to offering loans through LendingTree, Priceline.com recently announced that it had formed a joint venture with Alliance Capital Partners to offer name-your-price mortgages. In the future Alliance Mortgage, a subsidiary of Alliance Capital Partners and an approved Fannie Mae seller/servicer, will provide loan decisions on the Pricelinemortgage Web site using Fannie Mae's automated underwriting system, Desktop Underwriter(R).
New car sales by priceline.com's Automotive Services group rose by more than 100% in the past 30 days. Priceline.com recently announced an expansion of the name-your-price service to southern California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, eastern Pennsylvania. The service was already available in metropolitan New York. Last month, priceline.com named a new senior management team to head up the automotive group, including Maryann Keller, formerly one of Wall Street's leading automotive analysts as its new President, and Michael Seergy, the former top U.S. executive of Nissan North America as its Vice President and General Manager.
"The scalability of priceline.com's business model across multiple markets and services is evident as consumer acceptance and sales continue to grow in our established and new product lines," said Richard S. Braddock, priceline.com's Chairman and CEO.
About priceline.com
Priceline.com is the Internet pricing system that enables consumers to achieve significant savings by naming their own price for goods and services. Priceline.com takes consumer offers and then presents them to sellers who can fill as much of that guaranteed demand as they wish at price points determined by buyers.
Priceline.com's "virtual" business model allows for rapid scaling using the Internet. Because the Company electronically collects consumer demand, it can fill this demand directly with sellers or by using proprietary databases. Priceline.com does not maintain or warehouse inventories in any of its product lines.
Priceline.com's patented business system currently sells multiple services to its customers across three distinct product categories: a travel service that offers leisure airline tickets and hotel rooms, a personal finance service that offers home mortgages, refinancing and home equity loans, and an automotive service unit that sells new cars in southern California, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and metropolitan New York.
This press release may contain forward-looking statements that are made pursuant to the safe-harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Expressions of future goals and similar expressions including, without limitation, "may," "will," " believes," "should," "could," "hope," " expects," "expected," "does not currently expect," "anticipates," "predicts," "potential," and "forecast," reflecting something other than historical fact are intended to identify forward-looking statements, but are not the exclusive means of identifying such statements. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including the timely development and market acceptance of products and technologies and other factors described in the Company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The actual results may differ materially from any forward-looking statements due to such risks and uncertainties. The Company's undertakes no obligations to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date.