Priceline Adds Experiences to Its Website for Activities & Excursions

You’re probably familiar with Priceline, the online travel agency (OTA) popular for its discounted hotel and flight options. In keeping with other OTAs, Priceline has now added a new capability to its service — experiences. Let’s take a look.

Priceline Experiences

Online travel agencies act as the middle man between you and a travel provider. Often, they’ll offer slightly discounted rates when compared to booking directly. These types of discounts can extend to airlines and hotels and even experiences. Priceline’s newest feature, Priceline Experiences, offers more than 80,000 activities from which to choose.

To check out the debut, we entered a search for Edinburgh, Scotland, without using any dates. Priceline returned a wide variety of things to do, including a literary pub tour, whisky tasting, day tours outside the city, and even self-guided options.

Adding in this new feature allows those booking packages to stick entirely with Priceline; you can now create a full vacation via Priceline’s website. This can make it simpler when it comes to organization, but as always, we recommend caution when it comes to using an OTA. While using Priceline Experiences to book activities shouldn’t affect your tours, remember that hotels will not award you elite night credits or elite night benefits when booking with a third party.

Best Cards for Booking

Because Priceline Experiences is brand-new, we aren’t seeing any shopping portal bonuses for booking. This is likely to change in the coming days as cash-back services (like CashBack Monitor) catch up to the debut. This means you’ll be able to stack rewards from sites such as Rakuten in order to double-dip on earnings.

If you’re looking to book with Priceline Experiences, you’ll want to use a card that’ll maximize your earnings. Cards such as the Chase Sapphire Reserve^® and the Citi Premier^® Card will earn you 3x points per dollar spent on all travel. Otherwise, the Citi Prestige^® Card (no longer available to new applicants) will get you 5x points per dollar spent with all travel agencies, including Priceline.

Hot Tip: Want to redeem points for Priceline Experiences? Consider using a card like the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card that allows you to redeem your points for a statement credit against previous travel purchases. Points are worth 1 cent each when redeem this way.

Final Thoughts

It’s nice that Priceline has launched a new way to book activities, and it’ll be even better when shopping portals allow you to stack savings. With more than 80,000 options available worldwide, you’ll have your pick of tours no matter where you’re going.

The information for the Citi Prestige^® Card and Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card has been collected independently by Upgraded Points and not provided nor reviewed by the issuer.