Articles tagged “priceline”

Priceline's Jeffery Boyd is going out -- from the CEO post, at least -- at the top, and the guy with a banker's demeanor will come to be viewed as a rock star of online and mobile travel. We don't know about groupies, but there certainly are a ton of imitators.

The changing of the guard is now official -- in more ways than one.

With these kinds of numbers, Expedia's uphill fight in Europe continues to get steeper.

One of Expedia's answers to Booking.com is the Expedia Traveler Preference Program, giving consumers the choice to prepay for a hotel (merchant model) or pay at the hotel (an agency model like Booking.com's). Booking.com's sole use of the agency model gives it a speed advantage as the merchant model is more complicated when signing on and retaining hotels.

For the last decade destinations have fought hard for airtime on reality shows, but we may be seeing a new metric for tourism success: the Bourdain Bump.

You have to wonder whether Priceline relished breaking the $1,000 per share barrier or eclipsed the mark fearfully. With such records come very great expectations.

From Kayak's perspective, in additional to the big payday, international expansion was what the Priceline deal was all about.

CheapOair has already proven that it can make a viable business out of flights when its competitors are scurrying to build their hotel businesses. There will be pressures, and it won't be the fastest-growing business in the world, but there is plenty of room for companies like CheapOair that keep their heads down and focus on areas that others are neglecting.

If online travel agencies are heading toward becoming a hybrid of transactions and metasearch advertising, it is ironic that Kayak, Room 77 and Hipmunk have already become hybrids, having begun to take direct booking themselves in recent years.