Oral History: Ebookers and LastMinute Deals Showed Mergers Can Be a Blood Sport
Skift Take
When mergers go awry, it isn't always merely because the acquired company was a dog. Sometimes the purchaser likewise screws the whole thing up.
Arthur Kosten, a former Booking.com chief marketing officer, was talking about the time in early 2005 when Priceline.com's then-deals guru Glenn Fogel visited Bookings' Amsterdam office to begin discussions about acquiring the company.
"So essentially Priceline came by," Kosten recalled as part of The Oral History of Travel's Greatest Acquisition: Booking.com. "Glenn Fogel is a great guy, who did all the right acquisitions when everybody did the wrong acquisitions."
See the chart below, which supports Kosten's statement.
There's a lot of truth to Kosten's statement about Fogel's skill in identifying, and Priceline.com picking up, the UK's Active Hotels in 2004 and the Netherlands' Bookings B.V. a year later for less than $300 million for both. The deals helped catapult Priceline from a second-tier player — actually number three in the global online travel pecking order at the time — to Booking Holdings' current leading stature as a roughly $100 billion company.
Read the Booking.com Oral History Now
Fogel and team haven't always been so savvy, it would appear. For example, r
