Priceline.com (Free) brings casino-style flair to online travel reservations. Whether booking a hotel, flight, or car rental, you have the option to pass, by using the traditional online reservation system, or shoot for the moon, by Name(ing) Your Price for up to 60% off the top. Add a clean interface and mobile apps and Priceline looks like a fresh face with plenty of tricks up its sleeve. Aside from Name Your Price, however, Priceline comes up a bit short: Expedia (Free, 3.5 stars) delivers search result quicker, Travelocity (Free, 3.5 stars) does a better job building experience-based va-cations, and Orbitz (Free, 4 stars) is cleverest when it comes fare updates and price protection. Moreover, much as I adore William Shatner, he's everywhere on Priceline—his visage appears three times on the homepage alone—including while you wait (longer than competitors, coincidently) for search results. If price is your prize, feature-based limitations and Shatner-inflicted excesses will prove little deterrence. Priceline.com goes all-in on Name Your Price, and risk-taking bargain hunters will, too. For traditional travelers, however, Travelocity brings more features and Orbitz more peace of mind.

Site
Priceline.com's standard mode of search looks much like that of its competitors: Users select a search type (from tabs for flights, hotels, cars, vacations, or cruises), arrival and departing airport, dates, and number of passengers. As with Travelocity, Priceline automatically predicts airports as you type—so you needn't memorize airport codes or select airports from a second screen. Unlike Travelocity, however, Priceline lacks options to specify "flexible" travel dates or "+/- One to Three Days" to return the best airfare. In my experience, the predictive text is bit temperamental. It worked flawlessly for Hotels and Vacations, but it didn't recommend airports when you need them the most—for flights.

While the site looks clean and crisp overall, branding, specifically William Shatner, is overkill. As far as I can tell, he's on every page, including the loading pages. The fact that you're forced to watch him peer through binoculars, karate chop air, or give a businessman a noogie while pages load only serves to highlight Priceline's sluggish load times. After a few searches, I was ready to leave the site and renounce Star Trek.

Flight
I began testing by searching for flights, but found that I could add hotels by clicking tabs from the results page. Priceline makes it easy to hop from flight results to Name Your Price, Flight + Car, or Flight + Hotel packages. The tabs are a wonderfully clever feature, overall, though they do have two limitations. First, if you jump to Flight + Hotel packages, the tabbed structure changes so that it's difficult to get back to flights alone without hitting your browser's "Back" button. Second, the tabs come at the cost of the pricing matrix, offered by competitors Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity that, I feel, helps flexible travelers make smarter travel decisions.

By default, flights list by lowest priced, though you can filter by number of layovers, lay-over and trip durations, flight durations, airport, airlines, and aircraft. Travelocity—like everyone else other than Kayak (Free. 3 stars)—plays it loose when it disclosing the final cost of your trip. The actual price is listed in a font than the price before taxes and fees (though the full price is certainly clearer than that of Expedia and Travelocity). While Priceline.com—like Expedia—delivers flight details and seat maps from the search results page, it does not provide a price breakdown without leaving the page.

Vacation
You can sort Vacations—Flights + Hotels—through three tabs: Popular (default), Lowest Price, and Hotels Near. In addition, you can use a filtering system similar to that of flights, including hotel area, amenities, brand, star rating, guest rating, and property type (e.g. Hotel or Condo). If you're looking for a specific hotel, you can search for a hotel name and update the list. See Hotels on a Map pins results to a Bing map. Un-like flights, vacations don't hide the bill. Boldface prices include flight, hotel, taxes, and fees. One thing to watch: When booking for more than one traveler, Priceline.com still shows prices per person.

Name Your Price
While you can search for a flight or vacation as you would on any other online travel site, Priceline's claim to fame is Name Your Price. The idea behind Name Your Price is captivatingly simple. After you find the flight, hotel, or car that you want, you simply enter a bid, and charge information. If Priceline can find a taker, they'll charge and award you the item. If they can't, you get nothing and pay nothing.

The experience of Name Your Price varied depending upon the product. With flights, you can select your dates, airports, and a bid—otherwise, it's left to chance. Until you win the bid, you won't know what carrier, when your flight leaves, and how many layovers to expect. Car rentals allow more control: You can specify your pick-up and drop-off times and locations, car type (e.g. Economy), and your price (per day). Finally, with hotels, Priceline lets you call the area of the city and star rating. Unlike Travelocity's Top Secret Hotels, which names the price but hides the name of the hotel, Priceline's Name Your Price leaves the pricing to you. If you win, Priceline fills in the details. If you lose, you have to return to the table. While this leaves more uncertainty than Top Secret Hotels, it also means greater rewards: Priceline's book-ing system allows hotel chains to dynamically adjust pricing on the back-end, which translates to greater hotel availability and better pricing on the front-end (Top Secret Ho-tels claims up to 55% in savings, whereas Priceline boasts 60%).

Certainly, deals aren't guaranteed—there's a strategy to playing. Priceline.com claims that you can save up to 40% on flights or car rentals or up to 60% on hotels. While you can bid up next to nothing (I tried a dollar, plus taxes and fees), don't expect to win (I didn't): 40-60% off is the ceiling. You maximize your chances by veering close to those numbers. And, of course, there's a tradeoff. A "3 star hotel" in, say, "Midtown" leaves a lot to chance. "Economy" vehicles can be many things. And there's a huge difference between a flight at 5 A.M. and 5 P.M. Name Your Price isn't for the risk averse, but for flexible, adaptive travelers, it makes for fun booking and big savings.

Pricing
For everyone else who wants to know the name of the hotel at which they're staying and at what time of day they're departing and arrival, Priceline performs well for standard fare pricing. Priceline.com also includes Best Price Guaranteed, which, if you're an eagle-eyed consumer, en-sures you'll get the best deal available. Here's how it works: If you find a better deal for the same trip online within a day of booking, you can call an 800-number to earn the dif-ference plus a $50 credit. If you find a better price on a Name Your Price booking, Price-line will even throw in an extra $25. While this is the deal is similar to that of Expedia and Travelocity, Orbitz goes a step further in its Low Price Guarantee, adding automated fare updates to recent search results.

Ultimately, though, the results were surprisingly consistent in my experience. While I'm reluctant to claim any sort of scientific authority in my testing—as anyone who trav-els knows, airfares fluctuate wildly—I did try and set up two basic controls in my testing: a domestic weekend trip, New York to Miami, a month from my search date; and a second international week-long trip, New York to Lisbon, scheduled six weeks ahead. For both flights, I avoided multiple carriers—who wants to miss a flight walking from one to the next?—and sought three types of airfares: 1) the least expensive overall; 2) the least expensive non-stop; and 3) the shortest possible flight.

As denoted in green, the best deals are shared by a number of sites, and often little separates the least and most expensive options. For Miami, it's a matter of a couple dollars; with Lisbon, $14 separates Expedia from the best-priced competitor (a three-way tie between Travelocity, Kayak, and Orbitz), though there's no difference non-stop. The five minutes that separates the durations is too little to squawk about.

Bundling flights with lodging caused more variation. The challenge, however, was finding two hotels—one inexpensive, one recommended—available across the sites, especially difficult internationally. For the Miami vacation, I used the Days Inn Miami Air-port North for the least expensive common hotel and the Marriott Doral Golf Resort & Spa as the standard recommended hotel. For the trip to Lisbon, I chose Hotel VIP Executive Madrid as my baseline and Dom Pedro Palace Hotel Lisbon as my preferred option.

As you might expect, the greatest source of variation lies in the international vacation. Sites land within about $50 of one another with Miami; however, as much as $500 separates the least expensive bundles (Kayak and Orbitz) from the most expensive bundle (Priceline) to Lisbon. While Priceline was the most expensive-inexpensive international package ($1916), when it came to the recommended vacation, Priceline landed in the middle ($2168). A final note on bundling: while I built my vacations around single occupancy, you can grow savings by booking for more than one passenger at a time. For ex-ample, searching for the least expensive Lisbon vacation for two people returned between $100 and $400 in savings per person—$200 to $800 for a couple.

What you draw from these preliminary tests should not be a decisive winner and los-er, but rather an aerial view of pricing, and a distant one at that. Each site excels at different with different variables. When it comes to airfare alone, you're safe using any of the sites. If you're building a vacation, I advise using more than one to scope out the best deal. And, naturally, booking for more than one traveler at a time only sweetens the deal.

Single-Minded Negotiator
Priceline.com has one trump card: Name Your Price. And it's a good one. Whether you're booking a flight, hotel, or car, you can take advantage of the eBay-style bidding for big savings. Because of the uncertainty entailed, Name Your Price isn't for everyone. Thankfully, the site retrieves similar results and pricing as its competitors. Beyond that, though, Priceline has its limitations. Search is sluggish, branding conspicuous, and other innovations conspicuously absent. Editors' Choice pick Orbitz is a better choice if you want an ironclad deal—backed by automated price assurance and fare updates—on a traditional online reservation. For those, however, who are can and are willing to trade some security for the risk and rewards of travel by bid, place a bet with Price-line.com.

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