Articles tagged “priceline”

Rock, paper, scissors: The road trip, including an Uber, beats flying in a lot of cases for shorter holiday trips in December 2014. Still, under many scenarios, we'd prefer to see you at Gate A11.

Booking.com knows a few things about website creation and it plans on sharing these skills with hotels and becoming a key tech provider to them in the near future. The distribution business would still be primary, but Booking.com officials are bullish about its prospects in the B2B sector.

These are cliches, but true: It's mostly about the team and their ability to execute. Business models help, too: As Priceline's Glenn Fogel says, "Good execution of an OK idea is a lot better than lousy execution of a brilliant idea."

Expedia Inc. is following the TripAdvisor playbook on Trivago, which could go the spinoff/IPO route one day. The Priceline Group, meanwhile, is focusing on Booking.com and new-prize OpenTable as priorities while being measured about Kayak's international expansion.

Kayak started the direct-booking trend among travel metasearch sites, but now CEO Steve Hafner says improvements have been made on partner sites so direct booking is no longer a priority and can hurt, rather than help, turning lookers into bookers. Have the conditions really changed or is this Priceline Group-speak?

Lobbying firm Dickstein Shapiro tells prospective clients: "State AGs are the new sheriffs in town. Do you know them? We do. Sophisticated lawyering. Unparalleled relationships." It all seems to have paid off in Florida.

Being a leading online travel company these days means adding expensive pieces to the portfolio, and both the Priceline Group and Expedia Inc. are signaling that their acquisition sprees are far from being finished.

Will Booking.com be as good at business services for hotels as it is for selling their rooms, and will a move into enterprise services for hotels be a huge distraction? We are about to find out.

The Priceline Group's acquisition of Buuteeq, the largest of two hotel marketing-related acquisitions in the second quarter of 2014, was likely more substantial than most observers imagined. It is part of Priceline's strategy to become a B2B service provider for hotels.

The Priceline Group is moving much closer to Ctrip with a minority stake and CEO Darren Huston points to a series of additional moves in China in the next few years. Ctrip, though, hasn't always played well with other partners so it remains to be seen whether familial relations between these new second cousins will be long-standing.