Priceline: Blind Bids, William Shatner's Negotiator and a Psychic Ad Row

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Priceline was founded in Connecticut in 1997 by Jay Walker with early funding help from Michael Loeb, launched its website in 1998, and went public in the 1999 IPO wave under CEO Richard Braddock, formerly the number two executive at Citicorp. Its hook was Name Your Own Price, a form of opaque travel inventory: travelers set a city, quality level and price, and paid a nonrefundable charge before learning which airline or hotel they had. Airlines and hotels could fill empty seats and rooms without publicly cutting rates, and Priceline kept the spread between the customer's bid and the supplier's floor. In 2000 an affiliate called Webhouse Club stretched the model to groceries and gasoline, alongside long-distance phone service, cars and Priceline Yard Sales.

Nearly all the non-travel experiments shut down by 2002. William Shatner, signed in 1997 for stock instead of cash, became the face of the brand; a later CEO, Jeffrey Boyd, called the reported $600 million payout an urban legend. Shatner's Negotiator persona arrived in 2007, died in a 2012 bus crash ad and returned as a surfing ghost. Bidding ended for flights in 2016, rental cars in 2018 and hotels in 2020, replaced by Express Deals and Pricebreakers. The company renamed itself The Priceline Group in 2014 and later became Booking Holdings.

• Leonard Nimoy briefly replaced Shatner in 2004, leading to ads in which Shatner ran into his own replacement.
• A 2012 ad featuring Long Island Medium star Theresa Caputo drew criticism for appearing to mock Native American smudging rituals.
• DJ Grothe of the James Randi Educational Foundation challenged Caputo to take its $1 million paranormal challenge.
• The FTC warned the hotel industry in 2012 about hidden resort fees, yet such fees kept appearing at checkout for years.
• In 2013 Priceline was accused of using the firm Wiki-PR, which ran networks of fake accounts to edit Wikipedia for clients.