Jay Walker, a bidding idea and a Connecticut address.

Priceline was founded in 1997 by the entrepreneur Jay S. Walker and went online in 1998, according to English Wikipedia. Forbes, profiling Walker in September 2012, described him as the cofounder of Priceline and noted that he had since left the company; Wikipedia dates his departure to 2000, by which time Richard S. Braddock, formerly of Citicorp, had become chief executive. Braddock, Wikipedia says, helped take the company public in 1999 and left in 2004. The entrepreneur Michael Loeb is credited with helping in its creation and early funding.

The business made its name with a single phrase. Name Your Own Price let travellers suggest what they would pay for an airline ticket, a hotel room, a rental car or a holiday package, choosing a general area and a service level but not the specific airline or hotel. The details were revealed only after the purchase was completed, and the sale could not be cancelled. Wikipedia describes this as an “opaque” model, and records that in 2002 Priceline licensed the Name Your Own Price system to eBay.

Over time the company added more conventional ways to book. Wikipedia describes Express Deals, which shows a set rate and a neighbourhood but withholds the hotel’s name until after booking, and the company introduced it in June 2012 in a release from its Norwalk headquarters. Name Your Own Price was then wound down category by category: Wikipedia records that it ended for flights in 2016, for rental cars in 2018 and for hotels in 2020. The phrase that launched the brand is no longer one of its products.

Through these changes the company has kept its home in Norwalk, Connecticut. Wikipedia names Brett Keller as chief executive; in 2012 Keller was the company’s chief marketing officer, quoted in its press releases about the Negotiator campaign.

From Priceline.com Incorporated to Booking Holdings.

The corporate story runs in an unusual direction: the parent company was once named after the brand. In 2005 Priceline bought the Amsterdam hotel site Booking.com, and in May 2013 it bought the travel search engine Kayak, according to Wikipedia. The Independent later described the buyer of Kayak as The Priceline Group, which already owned Booking.com.

That name arrived in April 2014, when Priceline.com Incorporated changed its corporate name to The Priceline Group Inc. Wikipedia says the change was meant to draw a clear line between the group and the priceline.com business in the United States. The group was later renamed again, as Booking Holdings, and Priceline became one of its several consumer brands alongside Booking.com, Kayak and others. Wikipedia describes Priceline.com today as wholly owned by Booking Holdings.

The company’s early years coincided with the dot-com boom, and Wikipedia records some short-lived experiments outside travel. In 2000, through a partly owned affiliate called WebHouse Club, Priceline tried selling petrol and groceries under the Name Your Own Price model; it also tried an online auction service, Priceline Yard Sales. Travel remained the core of the brand.

Wikipedia describes the site today as a place to find discounted rates on travel purchases such as airline tickets and hotel stays. The company’s own press materials of the early 2010s describe a set of mobile apps carrying the Negotiator name, including a Hotel Negotiator app for iPhone, iPad and Android, which tied the advertising character directly to the product.

Design and documentation.

Travel sites live on small screens as much as large ones, so their identities are tested at very different sizes. A wordmark that reads well across the top of a desktop search page has to survive as a home-screen app icon, a favicon in a browser tab and a tiny badge on a booking confirmation email. Many travel brands answer that problem with a compact symbol or a single letter that can stand alone when the full name will not fit, and keep the wordmark for larger placements.

Colour does a lot of work in this category. A consistent brand colour helps a user spot the right app among dozens on a phone and recognise the brand inside a crowded comparison results page. Mascots and characters play a similar role: an animal, a figure or a costumed spokesperson can carry a brand across television, social video and outdoor advertising without relying on the name alone.

Television spokespeople and recurring advertising characters have long been part of the travel-site playbook, giving a web service a face and a voice. When a company refreshes its identity, these elements are often redrawn, retired or brought back, so it is worth checking the date of any logo, icon or campaign before treating it as current.

A Starfleet captain, a bus off a bridge and a medium.

Priceline’s brand has long been carried by a single spokesman. Wikipedia says the actor William Shatner, Captain Kirk of Star Trek, became the company’s spokesman in the late 1990s, agreeing to make the commercials in exchange for stock. An early campaign had him deliver popular songs in spoken word, in the manner of his album The Transformed Man. In 2004 he was “replaced” on screen by his Star Trek co-star Leonard Nimoy, with Shatner still appearing in the spots, running into his successor; when that campaign ended, Shatner returned as the sole spokesman.

In 2007, Wikipedia says, a campaign by the agency Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners recast Shatner as the Priceline Negotiator, a bargain-hunting character in a suit. Priceline wrote the character out in 2012. The Associated Press, in a report carried by The Christian Science Monitor on 19 January 2012, described a new 30-second spot in which the Negotiator rescues vacationers from a bus teetering on a bridge railing, hands his phone to a passenger, and goes over the side with the bus into a dry creek bed, followed by an explosion. Christopher Soder, then chief executive of Priceline.com North America, told the AP the change reflected the company’s broader strategy as a fixed-price booking site; Shatner said he was “in grief mode” and remained under contract.

The character did not stay gone. In a release dated 25 June 2012, the company announced a spot in which Theresa Caputo, star of TLC’s Long Island Medium, helps a hotel customer re-connect with the “dearly departed” Negotiator. Wikipedia records that in August 2012 Shatner was back on screen on a stormy beach in a parody of the end of the film Point Break, surfboard in hand, and that in January 2013 Kaley Cuoco of The Big Bang Theory joined him as the Negotiator’s fictitious daughter.

For a design guide, Priceline shows how far a brand can lean on a performer: the bidding model that the Negotiator stood for has been retired, but the character outlived his own on-screen death. Compare it with Booking.com and Kayak, its sister brands under Booking Holdings. For this guide we use negotiator blue, deal gold and navy with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Priceline’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.