Skift Take

The online travel industry focuses on every move or utterance from Airbnb and its CEO Brian Chesky. Not that Booking Holdings is an after-thought these days, but before Airbnb there was Priceline, Booking.com, and the Group's boss, Jeffery Boyd. Building blocks, certainly.

Series: Dennis' Online Travel Briefing

Dennis' Online Travel Briefing

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, Executive Editor and online travel rockstar Dennis Schaal will bring readers exclusive reporting and insight into the business of online travel and digital booking, and how this sector has an impact across the travel industry.

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Online Travel This Week No ticker-tape parades will be thrown when he leaves the board of directors June 3, but Jeffery Boyd had a spectacular run as CEO of Priceline.com and then the renamed Booking Holdings for more than 10 years, and nearly two decades as a board member, including seven as its chair. The reference to a ticker tape parade was intentional because Boyd's Priceline acquired what became Booking.com in 2005. Skift found, as part of our 2018 oral history of the Booking.com acquisition, that deal turned out to be among the five greatest deals in internet history in terms of value creation. Booking Holdings was trading Wednesday at $2,361 per share and had a $96.7 billion market cap. But Priceline.com, wracked by customer service issues of its own making, regulatory woes, the dot-com bubble, and 9/11 almost didn't survive to get to a couple of acquisitions — Active Hotels in 2004 and Bookings B.V. the next year — that unseated Travelocity and Expedia as online travel front-runners, and reverberated throughout the years.. Boyd stopped by Ski