Challenges in Travel Booking 2016: Booking.com Needs to Steal Expedia's Thunder
Skift Take
Don't downplay the importance of intangibles and narratives in the online travel business. Expedia won 2015. Booking.com won't sit back in 2016. In this transitional year in online travel and lodging on so many levels, you can expect that Booking.com will be heard from.
After Expedia consumed all the air in the room in 2015 by acquiring everything in sight and given all the angst about Arbnb's coming onslaught, the Priceline Group needs to win back the narrative in 2016.
In this second article in a three-part series, Challenges in Travel Booking 2016, Skift examines company-specific issues confronting three major online travel players, TripAdvisor, the Priceline Group and Expedia, in the coming year. To find the stories in the series click here.
Priceline didn't make any mega acquisitions in 2015 and declined to pull the trigger on acquiring HomeAway, as Expedia did for $3.9 billion. One can wonder, with some exaggeration, what's left to buy? Priceline's deal-maker Glenn Fogel is undoubtedly at this moment immersed in pitch decks and interviews trying to figure that out.
Wall Street was bullish about rival Expedia's prospects in 2015 as its stock rose 44.9 percent compared with a 14.29 percent jump at TripAdvisor and an 11.63 percent boost at the much-larger Priceline. That compared with the S&P 500 being flat for the year.
In November, tired of all the Airbnb talk and seeking to reorient the storyline, Priceline's Booking.com revealed that it offers 21 million bookable rooms. The theme was that Booking.com's growth, and especially its girth, compare favorably with Airbnb’s on the lodging front overall. And Booking.com can show some digital one-up-manship too because all of its 21 million rooms are instantly confirmable.
The Booking.com Group?
One of the Priceline Group's issues is its name. As much as officials of the parent company appreciate the legacy of its namesake Priceline.com and its longtime TV point man William Shatner, they cringe whenever journalists and pundits associate the Group, which also includes Booking.com, Agoda, Kayak, OpenTable and several other brands, with the Negotiator.
As Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston told me in November:
