Breaking: Hawaii Travel Deals On Amazon Prime Day For 1st Time

Big Hawaii deals are poised to be featured front and center on Amazon’s upcoming Prime Day, that will take place starting tomorrow, July 11-12. We said before that Amazon would be voyaging into the world of travel. What better place to start with than Prime Day + Hawaii. And this will be the first time ever.

Priceline will be the first travel brand to offer an exclusive Prime Day deal. The site currently runs ads throughout Amazon’s portfolio of streaming and audio products.

“We want to meet customers where they are. We know travelers are shopping on Amazon and booking travel with Priceline,” said Lesley Klein, senior vice president of marketing at Priceline.

Consumers have put the breaks on spending, including at Amazon, so the time is ripe to begin the awaited move. After all, we continue to want to enjoy travel experiences, more so it seems, than buying paper towels or televisions.

First time travel participation in Prime Day.

Amazon says that they will partner with Priceline/Booking to offer an additional 20% off Priceline’s Hotel Express deals. That means that huge discounts should be available. We suspect too that Amazon needs these deals to be substantive to gain traction and achieve credibility in this all-important new space for them.

What we find similar comparing Booking/Priceline and Amazon.

With both vendors, they make it exceedingly easy to buy. They already have all our details and you can reserve with just a few clicks. If we change our minds, both companies make that generally very easy too. That’s true when buying cancellable reservations on Booking (which we always do), or with Amazon when purchased directly from them and not in their third party marketplace.

Priceline said of this partnership, “We want to meet customers where they are. We know travelers are shopping on Amazon and booking travel with Priceline.”

Are you spending less at Amazon otherwise? We sure are.

We still recall that before and during Covid, we were spending more and more on Amazon. That as shopping in stores was more challenging, and inventory was a huge problem, especially here in Hawaii. It all came together as the perfect situation for Amazon to soar. Oh and needless to say, as Amazon soared, we weren’t traveling.

Now, however, the world has shifted once again, and we are buying only a fraction of what we used to on Amazon. There are a few reasons for that. One is simply trying to avoid buying more things. Shiny objects have lost a lot of their appeal. Then too, Amazon has become less attractive.

Programs that once enticed, like Subscribe and Save, among others, could be more attractive. When it comes time for the next shipment, the price is often significantly more. Not only that, but we’ve noticed that more and more vendors are no longer selling their products on Amazon. The deal isn’t quite as good for the vendors. So we are being forced to shop elsewhere for things we once bought on Amazon.

The King of travel (Booking) meets the king of shopping (Amazon).

As we’ve said, Booking is where we at least begin when looking at Hawaii hotels and vacation rentals. We may or may not ultimately buy there, but editor Jeff reports as a case in point that he currently has four upcoming Hawaii travel accommodations booked through the booking.com app. Booking/Priceline (one and the same) started in 1997, now operates in virtually every travel spot in the world, and partners with 400 airlines and 1/3 million hotels, just for starters.

Just last month we asked whether your next Hawaii vacation would come from Chase or Amazon!

In a prescient article last month entitled “Why You’ll Buy Hawaii Vacations From Banks or Amazon Next” we spoke to this deal that’s occurring just weeks later. Here’s what we said about Amazon travel:

“Amazon will be a travel giant, a tour company, a trip-insurance provider, and more. They have the power to control pricing as they do in their online product store. When they move in, everything changes.”

Well don’t look now folks, it just changed!

We weren’t prepared for it this soon, but Amazon Travel has arrived.

Not only is Amazon set to try its wings in Hawaii travel and beyond, but so is Chase. We recently started getting offers from Chase Travel. These are the companies that know us and our habits best.

Amazon knows if we aren’t buying things, we’re planning travel.

With the sudden shift in consumer spending, which is undoubtedly very painful at Amazon, shopping this has been pushed to the front burner of the retail giant.

Chase says it will sell 15 Billion in travel in next two years.

They also said that now, $1 in $3 their customers spend is on travel! This will get interesting, with Hawaii travel a behemoth of importance and size in the entire travel space.

The plan is for Amazon to use everything they know about us to do cross-selling.

Various perks, like tomorrow’s Prime Day, are to be offered to get our attention and shift our loyalty. While OTAs like Priceline/Booking know a good deal about us, Amazon knows far more. Thus the next winners in Hawaii travel are looking more and more to be those familiar companies.