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Priceline now worth $100B
- bflesch 9y agoNice, who would've thought that kayak, opentable and booking were worth north of $100Bn a couple of years ago. Kudos to the folks that made this a reality.
- jahnu 9y agoAs a European I find it amazing I hadn't even heard of this $100bn company till now.
- lobster_johnson 9y agoAside from Booking.com, they also own KAYAK, Cheapflights, Rentalcars.com and Open Table (the restaurant booking app).
- smcg 9y agoI was about to say "I don't know anyone who uses Priceline" but I didn't know they owned all those other companies and sites as well.
- jxramos 9y agothat I did not know. Good leveraging of similar applications.
- perfectstorm 9y agoTIL. I usually use Kayak and Booking.com (because you've the option to pay when you checkout). This comment made me realize that their only other major competitor is Expedia (fun fact: Expedia originated from Microsoft).
- komali2 9y agoI don't know how skyscanner continues to manage to fly under the radar. I've never found cheaper prices on any other aggregator.
- LightskinKanye 9y agoHave ya tried kiwi.com
- Consultant32452 9y agoGoogle flights is the best airline aggregator.
- fowl2 9y agoRegion specific. Good luck for flights in Asia/Australia/Pacific.
- guelo 9y agoYou've probably heard of Booking.com
- throwaway91111 9y agoActually no. Why is it so popular? It seems to have fewer features than hipmunk.... Not to knock them, though, it's a hard problem to solve well from an interface and integrations perspective.
- front2back44 9y agoLots of people use them. They're very very into AB testing to the point where they have a building at HQ dedicated to user testing. It may not look like much but they know how to drive their consumers to checkout. And another plus is that they offer free cancellation up to around 24 to 48 hours before your booking.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- atombender 9y agoPersonally, I reach for Booking.com because they're simply better than most competitors. They have a huge inventory of hotels, and they have a functional, fairly responsive search interface that isn't annoying. The last part is important — there's little in terms of popups, ads, intrusive upsells, flashy UI elements, and so on. It's not the most modern, but it's very well optimized towards finding stuff. For example, the path to seeing photos is very short (Hipmunk also does well here). Since they're very popular, they also have the benefit of having a large repository of reviews, and I find it easier than other sites to glean, from reviews and scores, how good a hotel is compared to others. TripAdvisor comes close, but is too annoying. Hipmunk is okay, but scores lower on usability for me than Booking.com.
- mp01 9y ago> TripAdvisor comes close, but is too annoying. Have you tried the new UI?
- jdross 9y agoBooking.com is part of Priceline group
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoUK here, heard of it, never heard anyone mention it nor seen anything of it in traditional media however. Presumably they're a USA only company?
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- vertex-four 9y agoThey do exist in the UK, they're a competitor to LateRooms. They regularly have adverts on the TV. They never seem to have cheaper inventory than LateRooms though.
- _delirium 9y agoBooking.com is very popular in Europe. In fact for years it was pretty much only in Europe. It was founded in the Netherlands and stuck to the continental European market initially. Now it's global, but Europe is still one of its bigger markets, and it's still headquartered in Amsterdam, though now as a subsidiary of an American company.
- dtech 9y agobooking.com is ginormous, at least everyone I know in the Netherlands using it to book hotels.
- splonk 9y agoThey're the biggest OTA in the UK, probably a little bit above Expedia, and with a wider gap between the top 2 and Agoda and LateRooms. They're also the biggest OTA in Europe at large. Priceline (really, Booking.com) is much bigger in Europe than the US.
- guelo 9y agoThe stock has been on a tear this month but without any news, makes you wonder if insiders know something.
- deedorgreed 9y agoIf you look at their 5 year, basically has been a tear forever.
- guelo 9y agoI wouldn't say that. From 2014 until June 2016 it was basically flat.
- tjpaudio 9y agoA $550m acquisition announced 2 days ago is not news?
- Kurtz79 9y agoInteresting, it seems like a company that had a very inflated valuation due to the dot-com bubble, was hit very hard when the bubble burst and it took almost 15 years for the stock price to get back to pre-bubble level...
- tedmiston 9y agoWell it's also a completely different company now with all of the acquisitions, such as Kayak. It would be interesting to know how the company's revenue is distributed amongst its companies.
- nobodyorother 9y ago> to get back to pre-bubble level Do you mean "rebubble," or is there some reason Priceline should be worth $100bn? They do about $400-500m in profit(?) a quarter, for $1.5-2bn/year. Is it the 22% margin that's so attractive? (https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3APCLN&fstype=ii&ei=4td4WbHRM8eI2AaNxYKACA https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3APCLN&fstype=ii&ei=...) Such a large margin might suggest they aren't making significant hardware purchases or that their rates could be undercut by a competitor, both of which would make me nervous as an investor for the long haul.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Danihan 9y agoThey were one of the only survivors of the dot com bubble though. Were they really valued at $70B+ back then?
- werber 9y agoI used to code for a hotel chain, and I remember that Priceline had some sort of weird legacy deal that made them essentially the only OTA (online travel agent) that was able to undercut the hotel's lowest price.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoIt's not exclusive to Priceline, and it's called Opaque pricing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opaque_travel_inventory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opaque_travel_inventory Basically, in exchange for a lower price, the hotel guest gives up their right to choose which hotel they want to stay at. And for the hotel, they get to sell lower priced rooms without advertising lower prices, enabling them to engage in price discrimination so they don't lose out on the people willing to pay them more. However, I find that the type of hotel guest Opaque pricing attracts is not a desirable hotel guest anyway, so most decent hotels don't participate. Or if they do, only when demand is very low and they're sitting empty.
- planteen 9y agoWhat "kind of guest" does this attract? I sometimes do this, especially in ski towns. I also sometimes negotiate at rural hotels to get a fade rate. Do hotels hate me?
- giarc 9y agoNot the commentor but I imagine those that are willing to find out the name of the hotel after they pay (to save some money) are not the type of customer that orders room service, get's spa treatments etc etc. Basically the opaque booking customer doesn't result in upsells during their stay.
- DonHopkins 9y agoNot rich ones like Shatner.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoThe big problem is it attracts hookers/pimps/drug dealers, and a lesser problem is that it attracts price conscious customers, but that's fine since if you are opening up that channel for customers, then you need their business. But it's not worth it if you're also getting the aforementioned problem parties. It would be unreasonable for a hotel to hate you just for asking for a negotiated rate, but hotels (and any business) will hate you for being annoying, especially when they bring up stupid reasons like "well I paid $x in nowhere, kansas"....
- mandeepj 9y agoThey should have split the stock way back like apple and google. Splitting have its own benefits. It would have added more value to their stock price.
- pilom 9y agoWhy? My understanding was that the only reason Apple and Google did stock splits was that they wanted to get onto the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is (stupidly) price weighted and not market cap weighted so without the split, they would have been a much larger portion of the Dow.
- mandeepj 9y agoTo make it affordable and easier for more people to buy their stock. This is always the biggest reason for split. Will an average person invest in a stock which is trading at $2k per share? Nope.
- nemo44x 9y agoThe average person is probably invested in their stock through a variety of ETF's.
- wheaties 9y agoThis is stupid. Really. Here we are in a world where the companies that own the assets (you know, the things that cost a lot of money) are worth less than the things that don't own anything. This doesn't seem "right" or "fair" in the sense that Priceline should be a middleman, unable to exercise any or all pricing power because it does not control the assets producing the revenue. I wonder how long this can last?
- rayiner 9y agoThe Internet has facilitated the age of the middleman. Owning stuff is expensive. It's much easier to leverage network effects to tie consumers to producers. Why make or build anything when you can control the market by controlling the app at the end of the distribution chain?
- WestCoastJustin 9y agoIt also allows for mom-and-pop shops selling direct to end users around the world. I used to run a video education business and that was pretty game changing when you have access to the world market via the internet. The key for priceline seems to the aggregation function that makes it a worthwhile middleman.
- sjg007 9y agoI think aggregation is a winner take all business basically. It's easier to do one priceline query vs go to each airlines website. The only thing easier might be an Alexa app or chat bot or something. Even then people that shop on priceline are probably more cost sensitive etc..
- stcredzero 9y agoThe Internet has facilitated the age of the middleman. Owning stuff is expensive. Therefore, we should be looking for industries where connecting buyers to sellers is the big question! (Or owners to leasers, or lenders to borrowers.) We should also be looking at why apps that are supposed to do this connecting fail.
- 43224gg252 9y agoWhy did you get downvoted? Priceline PR team?
- front2back44 9y agoLol no idea. I used to work for one of their companies that's why I know this info.
- throwaway91111 9y agoProbably came off as trolling, now that I see how large the site is. Not too bothered about it!
- dang 9y agoPlease don't insinuate astroturfing or shillage in HN comments unless you have evidence. The use of this as a standard (and toxic!) trope in internet arguments is something we definitely need to stay away from. Much more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20astroturfing https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&date... if anyone wants to read about HN's take on this. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858440 and marked it off-topic.
- hatred 9y agoI am amazed. In fact, I still remember when someone told me in 2011'ish that they are worth ~30b$; I had the same reaction. Does anyone know how they justify their valuation? Is it mostly by acquiring other smaller companies (Kayak etc.) and who are the other big competitors to Priceline?
- Danihan 9y agoShit, I didn't know they bought Kayak.
- giarc 9y agoThe big competitor is Expedia. Who owns Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, trivago, Venere.com, Travelocity, Orbitz, and HomeAway. I think the value of these two companies is that people load up a few of these sites thinking they are price shopping but in the end the money goes to the same pot. Priceline is the same.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y agoThe main reason for Priceline's valuation is Booking.com. A lot of people tend to think of Priceline as "that name your price airfare site", but it is really Booking.com that is responsible for the lion's share of their valuation.
- pdog 9y agoWilliam Shatner asked for stock instead of cash when he started advertising for Priceline.com twenty years ago. His shares are now worth $4 billion.
- mercwear 9y agoI don't know if they are still his shares =) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priceline.com#William_Shatner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priceline.com#William_Shatner
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- flignats 9y agoHe sold his shares at a very low price a long time ago
- mpweiher 9y agoSo he "only" made $600m. Although apparently the numbers are disputed. Heck, even 1/10th of that is a tidy sum.
- Fej 9y agoI'm guessing he doesn't really need the money at this point, especially given his age.
- dajohnson89 9y agoI really don't understand this line of thinking. Are old people incapable of spending money? Is what they chose to do with capital of less consequence? Even if they do have one foot in the grave, they have a right to legacy.
- ido 9y ago
- sAbakumoff 9y agoIn addition to booking.com, Priceline group owns Agoda, the OTA juggernaut in Southeast Asia.
- omi 9y agoJust an asset bubble. Will end in tears, as usual.
- calt 9y agoThe headline should read "Priceline Group Inc. now worth $100B" priceline.com is pretty tiny compared to the totality of the group... Mostly booking.com really.
- dang 9y agoI think it's ok for Priceline Group Inc. to be referred to as Priceline for short.
- didip 9y agoWow this chart and the comparison to its competitors made me see that travel industry is humongous.
- miles_matthias 9y agoWow, the stock price grew 10x in 7 years. OpenTable & Kayak are great companies, so I'm happy to see Priceline supporting their endeavors.
- z3t4 9y agowondering how something worth 100B looks like the first link i click on the web page returns 404
- LynxInLA 9y agoGreat timing, Acquired just did a podcast about their acquisition of Booking.com, which has been called the “second or third best acquisition of all-time.” http://www.acquired.fm/episodes/2017/7/25/episode-41-bookingcom-with-jetsetter-room-77-ceo-drew-patterson http://www.acquired.fm/episodes/2017/7/25/episode-41-booking...
- samfisher83 9y agoSo many of the travel sites are owned by Priceline. Here is wikis list: Booking.com Priceline.com Agoda.com Kayak.com Cheapflights Rentalcars.com momondo OpenTable I am surprised they haven't bought Expedia or the other major sites.
- joneholland 9y agoThat's because Expedia Inc owns all the others.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y agoNewsflash: Almost all of the travel sites you've heard of are owned by Expedia or Priceline. Priceline couldn't buy Expedia because it would get killed by antitrust concerns. Expedia also owns Travelocity, Orbitz, Hotwire, Hotels.com, VRBO, HomeAway, has a majority stake in Trivago, etc. Basically the only big travel sites not owned by Expedia or Priceline are TripAdvisor (previously spun off from Expedia) and AirBnB.
- coldcode 9y agoWhen Priceline started the Execs at Travelocity laughed at them. Today Travelocity is a brand of Expedia and just serves up Expedia content.
- misterbwong 9y agoIf you were to tell a non-HNer that Kayak, Booking, Priceline, CheapFlights, OpenTable, and other large websites are worth 100B combined, I don't think they would even blink an eye. Come here and the top discussion thread is about how little Priceline does, how they're "just middlemen", and that they don't add any value. It's clear that HN (and techies as a whole, I assume) highly discounts the value of users, marketing, brand, and distribution. Really is fascinating how different perspectives can be.
- famil 9y ago> how they're "just middlemen" As are Uber/AirBnb and internet advertising giants Google and Facebook.
- sliverstorm 9y agoHN might also be aware of the market caps of the airlines Priceline books for: Delta: 34.4B Southwest: 30.2B American: 22.1B United: 18.7B Are we incorrectly discounting marketing, brand, etc when we notice that the top booking service is valued triple the top actual provider? That the value they add might not actually be triple the value of the actual flight?
- inthewoods 9y agoFlights are only part of the picture - hotels, car rentals, et al. Anything, basically, to do with travel.
- acchow 9y agoMargins on flights are slim. Hotel bookings are the real meat.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y agoThis is a common misconception based on Priceline's history. The vast, vast majority of Priceline's value is Booking.com, which does hotel bookings. The margins on flight bookings are razor thin and probably only add value by enabling travelers to add hotels to their flights.
- sdy 9y agoI have no experience in the travel industry, but I see the value in priceline (name your price). They provide hotels a way to keep the rooms filled without disclosing to the public the low rates. It also provides a way to reach a different market. Source: I use priceline (name your price) at least once a year. Pretty happy with them.
- tabeth 9y agoIMO a company's "real" value is determined by how useful it would be if the Earth had a high likelihood of complete destruction in a century. Needless to say, Priceline would probably be worth nothing in such a scenario. Interestingly, Google and Facebook would still be pretty useful, albeit maybe not as much.
- firefoxd 9y agoFor the past 2 or 3 years i saw commercials of kayak on tv. Everytime I'd be price shopping, I'd start with their website. It never worked. I couldn't understand why they would advertise on tv and then have a broken website. You know that page where it says it is doing the price comparison in the background? That's where it always stopped for me. Frozen, never updating. Last month, I was travelling again and went to kayak just to check. I get to that page and it's frozen again. But this time i notice the little red X on the top right corner of the browser. > Popup blocked I went to the next website of course, but it makes me wonder. How much money have they lost because they decided to use pop-ups for no good reasons?
- untog 9y agoThere's a principle that I try to apply in situations like this: giving other developers some credit. By which, I mean that if every Kayak search was frozen, for every user, I believe that the developers over there would have caught that and fixed it. If a meaningful number of people were experiencing freeze errors, I also expect they would have caught it. Is it possible the problem is your browser setup, and this is not an experience other people have?
- Tepix 9y agoI've never seen an ad for Kayak, however I've found some good car rental rates in the last two years using their mobile app.
- djakademiks 9y ago100 BIG ONES!! I drive by their hq everyday and i can tell. Supercars, superthots, hell i think i even seen SUPERMAN!
- forkLding 9y agoI think the reason why some people (including me) can't fathom how Priceline can be successful is the same reason why they won't be able to start or scale another Priceline to success