Costco Travel recently started using a stringent star-rating system. “Trust us; we do the
analysis upfront on behalf of our members
to save them time and money,” says Richard
Murphy, Costco Travel's buyer for Hawaii.
In addition to Hawaii, destinations for travel
packages range from Mexico and the
Caribbean to Europe, the South Pacific and
select domestic U.S. destinations.
Car rentals
One of the fastest-growing segments of
Costco Travel is car rentals. The driver
behind the explosive growth in rentals is a
proprietary new technology: a search
engine called the Low Price Finder. In an
innovative move aimed at making pricing
more transparent, Matt Browning, Costco
Travel director of IT, and his team, in collaboration with other Costco Travel executives and their respective groups, scrapped
the previous system and designed an
entirely new tool. It enables side-by-side
price comparisons of all four car rental
companies Costco offers, for a clear and
concise view of the best value. It also
searches for any coupons or discount codes
from each car rental company and automatically applies the savings to the price,
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Personnel and pricing
