Until now, if you were on a road trip and you wanted to scout nearby hotel deals where you could crash, you had to figure out the name of the nearest town so you could plug it into an app.
Priceline has moved ahead a step—it's a wonder it took until 2016. Now, when you open the Priceline app, you can tell it you're "On a Road Trip," and it will sense your location and allow you to enter an endpoint. The app then maps the route and gives you hotel deals found along the way.
The search results, which can be filtered by budget and star rating, include "Express" deals, which don't tell you the name of the property until you have paid the discounted rate. If you don't want to have the app detect your location, the tool also allows you to manually enter a start point. Priceline has said that about 70 percent of the deals shown are exclusive to the company.
Priceline reps said they ordered the "Road Deals" improvement because internal data told them that 43 percent of its customers reported booking same-day hotel reservations en route to their destination.