6 Takeaways From The Oral History of Travel's Greatest Acquisition Booking.com
Skift Take
The stars were seemingly aligned when Booking.com made its move. The big U.S. players were too comfortable with their huge margins from the merchant model; Booking.com focused on independent hotels; and search engine marketing was on the rise. Still, it was the entrepreneurs and dealmakers who made it all happen.
Readers of The Oral History of Travel's Greatest Acquisition Booking.com will likely draw their own lessons from the two startups, Active Hotels and Bookings B.V., and these game-changing serial acquisitions.
But here are six takeaways that we pulled out:
1. Outsiders Brought New Perspectives
The founders and co-founders of Active Hotels and Bookings.nl were technology-focused outsiders to the hotel industry, which helped.
These outsiders refused to heed the advice of all the supposedly smart people, who counseled them that the merchant model and dynamic packaging would be the future of travel. Instead, these startup founders kept their heads down, and focused what they new was already working despite the proddings of the self-annointed.
Being tech-oriented and in an era when Big Data was unheard of, they focused on the numbers, testing what worked and abandoning what didn’t.
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2. Venture Capital Isn’t Always the Way to Go
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