Priceline Group CEO Faults Hotel Association for False Allegations
Skift Take
There is ample competition among hotels, online travel agencies, and airlines in the U.S. travel marketplace as all of these sectors have seen a spate of consolidation. It may make sense business-wise for these companies, but none of it is particularly good for consumers or competition.
Priceline Group CEO Glenn Fogel is good with numbers, and the folks at the American Hotel & Lodging Association know their way around an Excel spreadsheet, too, but when it comes to assessing the health of the U.S. travel market and competition, they come up with totally different equations.
The news broke a week ago that the lodging association, which includes major hotel chains as members, was planning on lobbying the Trump administration, and readying an advertising campaign, to show that Expedia Inc. and the Priceline Group are a duopoly that harms U.S. competition.
Asked Tuesday during the Priceline Group's earnings call to share his thoughts on the lobbying effort, Priceline's Fogel argued that his company wields merely a "mid-single-digit-percentage" market share of the hotels that are available on its sites.
When considering the $1.3 trillion global travel industry, the Priceline Group accounted for less than 1 percent marketshare as it generated $10.74 billion in revenue in 2016.
"One, as I think we have talked about before and you can do by just doing some math on the numbers that we've revealed, we have a mid-single-digit percentage market share in this business," Fogel said Tuesday. "There are a couple implications to that. One is we got a lot of
