Analysis: Verdict on Priceline CEO's Strategy Is Muddled by His Abrupt Ouster
Skift Take
Now-former Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston's decision to emphasize organic growth, his insistence that all properties sold on Booking.com be online bookable and instantly confirmable, and his strategy to keep Booking.com solely focused on the hotel business all set his tenure apart from those of his peers at Expedia. If you can set aside his apparently reckless behavior for a moment, it's a shame Huston won't be around to see his strategy through or to pivot, as required.
By all accounts, Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston was performing admirably, or "killing it," as one former colleague put it, before his tenure at the company came to a crashing close April 27 with revelations that he had an improper relationship with a female employee.
A former Starbucks and Microsoft executive, Huston, a Canadian, moved to Amsterdam and became CEO of the Priceline Group's flagship business, Booking.com, in September 2011, and then added the Group CEO title on January 1, 2014, succeeding the legendary Jeffery Boyd.
During Huston’s 4.5-year tenure at the company, including the more than two years before Boyd left as CEO and became non-executive chairman, the Group's room nights booked tripled and from 2011 to 2015 the Priceline Group’s market cap rose 173 percent to $66.34 billion.
The Group’s operating profits increased from $1.4 billion in 2011 to $3.26 billion in 2015 while the employee roster climbed from about 5,000 to more than 15,000 through the end of 2015.
So far in 2016, the Priceline Group's stock price has risen 7.78 percent to $1,353.74 per share while Expedia, at just one-fourth the market cap of its chief rival, has seen its stock price fall 11 percent so far this year to $121.26.
He Won't Make Waves?
Vying for supremacy in a $1.4 trillion global travel market, and competing against many other brands, as well, Huston's Priceline Group and Dara Khosrowshahi's Expedia have activated dramatically different strategies — and Huston won't be around to see his through or to modify them.
One of the chief differences over the last two years has been Expedia's buying binge, including the acquisitions of Wotif, Travelocity, Orbitz Worldwide, and HomeAway, versus Priceline's largely organic growth strategy — at least to date.
After then-CEO Boyd acquired Kayak in 2013, a move that Huston later didn't appear to be solidly behind out of a distaste for metasearch, one financial analyst told Skift in early 2014 that when Huston took over he likely wouldn't rock the boat or make any big moves initially, because
