Complete Interview: Priceline CEO on Staying in High Gear
Skift Take
When Huston took over as CEO of the Priceline Group 13 months ago, a financial analyst told us that Huston would play it safe and not make any bold moves in his first year at the helm because he needed to assure Wall Street about his leadership. Boy, was that analyst wrong.
Editor’s Note: Skift published a series of interviews with online travel CEOs talking about the Future of Travel Booking, and we turned it into our first e-book. It was only fitting that Darren Huston, the guy who as the top guy at the Priceline Group generated so many headlines in 2014, closed out the series with a flourish.
Here is his interview, which is now online in full for the first time.
Darren Huston, the CEO of the Priceline Group, admits that he and his team are data junkies and in parsing the data, he points to Google as the Group’s most efficient marketing partner.
More effective than Bing, Yandex, Baidu and, by implication, even Kayak.
Still, Huston says the Priceline Group’s Booking.com, Priceline.com, and Kayak have supplemented digital marketing with television advertising, where data metrics are less transparent. “It was a natural outcome in some ways because Google is having harder times growing as fast as we need to grow, so we're sourcing demand from more and more varied places,” Huston says.
In a sit-down with Skift in Los Angeles in November about the future of travel booking and related topics, Huston says he’s as gung-ho about the Priceline Group’s acquisition of Kayak as his predecessor, Jeffery Boyd was, and he mentions that “Kayak has actually, if anything, proven to be a more important part of the Group than I would have ever thought.”
Still, Huston is fairly dismissive of price-driven metasearch in general and the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t pricing games that are endemic to lot of metasearch sites.
In that regard, Huston compares Booking.com to Amazon, offering that metasearch isn’t the optimum marketing arm for either. “If you're a player like Booking.com, just like Amazon doesn't love book metas, it's not that the largest player on accommodations would love to sell his product through hotel metas,” Huston says.
On other topics, Huston says the Priceline team respects companies, such as Uber and Airbnb, that are in “high gear” and takes motivation from them; is in “constant discussions” with HomeAway about working together but “It just takes time and the bar that we're holding out is that things [vacation rental bookings] need to be instantly confirmable, immediately bookable,” and is bullish about the Priceline Group’s entry into the digital marketing and technology side of the hotel business.
On the OpenTable acquisition, Huston says the purpose wasn
