Articles tagged “oral history”

We don't know if it was really "a supermodel" and her tiny dog that William Shatner dispatched to Priceline.com headquarters in the late 1990s to do due dilgence on the company, but we do know that Shatner, who smashed a guitar during one shoot, was highly talented and broke new ground for an emerging brand.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Decolar approached local airlines to forge partnerships, the carriers just didn't appreciate what the site was trying to do. But Decolar, which has its struggles today, indeed outlasted many of those airlines.

Building up an affiliate network became a great marketing tool for Travelstart in South Africa a decade ago because print ads weren't effective. The incumbent competitors weren't particularly effective because they had no focus on e-commerce.

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.

Hostelworld needed to automate the online booking of hostels because there just wasn't enough money in it if employees or call center agents had to handle bookings over the phone. The company gave away free software to attract owners and then came up with a business model that was midway between Expedia's prepay model and Booking.com's pay at the hotel formula.

Ctrip did its own thing and adapted to conditions in China when it was created but its founders were very much aware of what was going on in the rest of the world, including the development of search engines, as well as Travelocity, Expedia and Priceline. One of the things that differentiated Ctrip from the outset was it appreciated the outsized importance of technology.

Booking.com rode the agency model, which is attractive for its lack of complexity in forging online travel agency-hotel relationships and consumer-friendliness, into the growth engine of a $68 billion business. Its executives did so by ignoring the trendiness of the crowds and sticking to their own beliefs and vision.

We're not giving away all the good stuff. You still need to read the entire thing.

We dig into Skift's new opus on online travel and get some behind-the-scenes insight from its author.

Two decades after the birth of online travel, more than two dozen founders and key players exclusively tell Skift how it all happened. This is a story of a history that changed the future of travel forever. Dig in, this will take a while.