Articles tagged “barry diller”

Facing intense competition and a company in disarray, the Expedia Group board and senior executive Barry Diller have no time to dillydally. No one can forecast what the online travel market will look like in the next five years, but Diller et al need to find a couple of top executives who can quickly figure out Expedia's path forward.

Expedia will stop being a controlled company after it acquires Liberty, and Barry Diller, chairman of Expedia, will own about 29 percent of the online travel group's voting power. The move makes the company's ownership structure more transparent, which is a good thing.

Diller is one of the godfathers of online travel and Expedia is probably among the top two travel advertisers in Google. Whether his comments will lead to lobbying or business practice changes, is today's multibillion dollar question.

With a two-decade track record in online travel, Khosrowshahi has had his duck-and-cover as well as been-on-a-mountaintop moments. If Uber's looking for a steady hand, and a guy with experience who isn't afraid to take a U-turn when called for, then they could have done a helluva lot worse.

Barry Diller, the senior executive at both IAC and Expedia, doesn't need any more plaques on his mansions' walls but he is one of the people who had oversized influence in making online travel what it is today. He had a great eye for how e-commerce would emerge and he pulled the trigger on his great acquisitions.

If you have a company with multiple product lines and consumer strategies, you want a chairman like Barry Diller to have your back.