Ceo Journal

Darren Huston worked as a marketing executive at McKinsey & Co. an executive at Starbucks, where he rolled out Wi-Fi in cafes as well as the Starbucks Card and most recently Microsoft, where was a corporate vice president in the company’s consumer and online division. Darren Huston record of leadership inside Priceline is brief but promising. Booking.com’s gross booking has consistently grown by a 40% to 43% annual rate under his management. Read full article @ https://fortune.com/2013/12/19/can-priceline-extend-its-impressive-run/

Darren Huston has been at the Priceline Group since only 2014, but the CEO is making big moves and they’re already paying off: The company sold $50 billion worth of travel in 2014 and posted an 11% increase in profits in its most recent quarter. Darren Huston shapes the company in two ways: First, his experience in digital at Microsoft and consumer services at Starbucks have made him a meticulous, hands-on operator. Second, Darren Huston’s made some promising acquisitions in his short reign. Read full article @ https://fortune.com/businessperson-of-the-year/2015/darren-huston/

Darren Huston , The Priceline Group is the dominant online player based on its scale, speed, search engine marketing strategy, and conversion skills, but perhaps its compensation policy should be added to the list of factors, as well. Priceline’s stock price increased 87% in 2013. Its gross bookings jumped 37.7% year over year. Priceline’s adjusted EBITDA climbed 35.9% year over year, and Priceline retained its position as the leader in global room nights booked. Read full article @ https://skift.com/2014/04/24/priceline-ceo-huston-earned-17-9-million-in-2013-a-very-good-year-for-the-company/

Darren Huston said “What an asset, but on the other hand it’s a little bit of baggage for us because we’re the Priceline Group. Every time I do an interview, they show a picture of William Shatner. We’re just so much more than that. I hope people start to learn that. I love our legacy namesake business, but look, we’ve got OpenTable, Booking.com, Kayak. We’re now listed as one of the best companies to work for in the Internet segment in Fortune. Read full article @ https://skift.com/2016/02/01/challenges-in-travel-booking-2016-booking-com-needs-to-steal-expedias-thunder/

While Expedia dominated headlines with its more than $6 billion worth of acquisitions in 2015, the Priceline Group needs to win the narrative back and CEO Darren Huston made his case about his company’s competitive advantages. “Our capabilities and scale in partner acquisition, customer experience, and efficient demand generation plus our large installed base of accommodations and loyal travelers give the Priceline Group a competitive moat that is deep and wide,” Darren Huston said. Read full article @ https://skift.com/2016/02/17/priceline-group-ceo-we-have-double-the-hotel-bookings-of-expedia/

Darren Huston , who now runs BlackPines Capital Partners. Operto Guest Technologies, a property automation system for vacation rentals, hotels, and serviced apartments, disclosed that last year it raised about $2 million in funding from angel investors. The Vancouver-based startup, which has 15 employees, automates guest entry by programming unique codes for every reservation onto keypad locks. Its other tools monitor noise, occupancy, air quality, and thermostat control. The company has debuted a new dashboard for workers to use. In the next three months, Operto will add integrations with leading hotel property management systems. Read full article @ https://skift.com/2019/02/08/2nd-address-raises-10-million-for-rental-bookings-travel-startup-funding-this-week/

Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston touts his company’s organic growth versus Expedia Inc.’s strategy of mostly acquiring companies that need to be put back on track. Rest assured, however, that Priceline would plunk down a few billion dollars on the right acquisition target. It just wasn’t HomeAway, and TripAdvisor and Airbnb are too expensive. CEO Darren Huston says his company didn’t get involved when HomeAway put itself up for sale because “we’re quite picky” and HomeAway’s model of allowing vacation rental owners to wait 24 hours before confirming a booking and charging travelers a booking fee “just didn’t fit us.” Read full article @ https://skift.com/2015/11/30/interview-priceline-ceo-on-why-he-didnt-spend-4-billion-to-acquire-homeaway/

Darren Huston is that chains are shooting themselves in the foot and their properties aren’t happy when the chains offer lower rates on their own websites because then their listings on Booking.com won’t convert as well as they should. But as Darren Huston says in a different context, perhaps the hotels would reply that they are “playing the long game.” Read full article @ https://skift.com/2016/02/17/priceline-group-ceo-doesnt-appreciate-hotel-chains-direct-booking-moves/

Darren Huston , Our company was born from a desire to make life better for property managers - the busiest people we’ve ever met. Our early days of managing the challenges of guest access revealed a much greater need. Property managers had no visibility into the status of their units and no centralized system from which to operate. While smart home technology was becoming increasingly common, nothing brought solutions together to create a cooperative ecosystem. That seed brought us to where we are today: Operto. The name is based on the Italian word aperto, which means open and reflects our mission to open possibilities for property managers and their guests through meaningful technology and personalized experience. Our new solution features a fully redesigned dashboard that will serve as your daily command center. View the status of your properties in real-time. See which guests have checked-in and which units need to be cleaned. Get notified when guests check-out so you can sche...

Slickspaces automates guest entry, check-in, and check-out processes for property managers, apartments, bed and breakfasts, hotels, and other accommodations providers. The Vancouver-based company has raised $3 million in funding, including an investment from BlackPines Capital Partners Inc., whose founder and CEO is ex-Booking Holdings CEO Darren Huston . He also serves as Slickspaces’ executive chairman. Read full article @ https://www.vrmintel.com/vr-companies-make-phocuswrights-hot-startups-list/

Slickspaces is bringing automation and technology to both guests and hosts at vacation rental properties through things like smart locks and voice-led tools. With ex-Booking Holdings CEO Darren Huston serving as executive chairman, a new funding round and integration with online travel agencies and the likes of Airbnb, Slickspaces can look at the market at a global scale. Goals for 2019 In 2019, Slickspaces plans to grow on a global scale. To meet the needs of its hospitality manager clients, who want to scale quickly in an increasingly competitive environment, it will harness the power of automation to deliver both operational efficiency and a world-class guest experience. Founded: 2016 Team size: 15 Funds raised: $3 million Website: Slickspaces

Darren Huston will help guide the company’s efforts as Executive Chairman. Slick Spaces Technologies Inc., the award-winning tech start-up providing the world’s first property automation platform for short-term rentals, today received a significant initial round of investment from BlackPines Capital Partners Inc. Proceeds from the BlackPines investment will be used to help Slick Spaces build out its successful model of rental automation for the hospitality industry, focused on the needs of property managers in the vacation rental, apartment, and boutique hotel sectors. Check latest news about BlackPines Capital Partners @ https://www.blackpinescapital.com/news

Allegro, a leading online marketplace in Poland, today announces the appointment of Francois Nuyts as Chief Executive Officer with effect from 1 August 2018. Przemyslaw Budkowski, the current CEO, will be stepping down to pursue other business interests. Mr. Nuyts joins from Amazon where he was most recently responsible for establishing Amazon in Southern Europe, as Vice President & Managing Director of Amazon Spain and Italy. Prior to this, he held various senior management roles within Amazon, including Country Manager, Spain; and Director, Media Categories, France, Italy and Spain. Previously, Mr. Nuyts worked at the consultancy firm Accenture. Mr. Nuyts will be relocating to Warsaw. Przemyslaw Budkowski has been CEO of Allegro for more than seven years. During this time, Allegro has continued to expand, becoming Poland’s leading eCommerce engine. Allegro offers more than 90 million products through a community of more than 100,000 Polish merchants who sell their products a...

Darren Huston , chief executive of Booking.com told an audience at ITB Berlin this week that marketing initiatives by hotels chains such as Marriott and Hilton are annoying. Marketing initiatives by hotels chains such as Marriott and Hilton which talk up the benefit of booking direct, have not escaped the notice of Darren Huston , chief executive of Booking.com. “It’s annoying,” he told an audience at ITB Berlin this week. Hilton’s “stop clicking around” TV ad was shown for reference. His response was hardly a surprise and presented in a tongue-in-cheek way (“I was at a chain hotel the other week and the wifi password was ‘book direct’, as if that would persuade me). But there was a steely resolve beneath the soundbite. “We see them as business partners, and we’ve brought them lots of business they wouldn’t have had.” Read full article @ https://www.chinatravelnews.com/article/99840

Ten years from now, travel won’t involve any paper, says Darren Huston , president and CEO of the Priceline Group and booking.com. “You’ll have no passport, no credit cards, no confirmation,” predicts the Amsterdam-based Canadian. “You’ll just have your phone in your pocket, and if you lose it, everything will be in the cloud.” Until someone invents teleportation, though, we’ll still have to fly – something Darren Huston doesn’t actually like to do. (He makes the most of his air time by sleeping and working.) But for now, it’s the only way he can access all the local experiences he craves. “I like bizarre flavours and tastes. I’ve eaten ants in Nairobi, frogs in Vietnam and lots of strange things in China – I really enjoy that about travel.” Black book: Europe Comfort food: “In Amsterdam, if I feel homesick, I go to Restaurant Red. They only serve three things: steak, Canadian lobster and wine.” Local fave: “Outside of Amsterdam is a little city called Delft, which...

Darren Huston was trying to watch a hockey game, half-listening to a headhunter talk about a company he had never heard of before. But as the headhunter went on, the then-45-year-old executive in charge of Microsoft’s global consumer and online businesses tuned out the arena noise and began listening to what he thought was an impossible story. “I said, ’There’s nothing that big in Europe on the Internet,‴⁣ he recalled, laughing. The 2011 call was from Booking.com, the Amsterdam-based unit of Priceline Group that dominates the European online travel market. By last year, Darren Huston became president and CEO of Priceline Group itself, which has come from dot-com laughingstock to the fifth most-valuable U.S. Internet company—if one still really considers it a U.S. company, because 90 percent of its profits come from overseas, most of them from Booking.com. Read full story @ https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/31/why-pricelines-booker-in-chief-is-spending-big.html

Expedia’s acquisitions versus the Priceline Group’s “competitive moat.” Rock, paper, scissors. It’s an interesting contest and in the $1.4 trillion global travel market, both companies can be winners. Expedia is trending upward and Priceline is showing strong growth, as well. While Expedia dominated headlines with its more than $6 billion worth of acquisitions in 2015, the Priceline Group needs to win the narrative back and CEO Darren Huston made his case about his company’s competitive advantages. “Our capabilities and scale in partner acquisition, customer experience, and efficient demand generation plus our large installed base of accommodations and loyal travelers give the Priceline Group a competitive moat that is deep and wide,” Huston said. [For Darren Huston elaboration on these points, see excerpts from the Priceline Group’s fourth quarter earnings call February 17 at the bottom of this post.] Read full story @ https://skift.com/2016/02/17/priceline-group-...

One of the Priceline Group’s issues is its name. As much as officials of the parent company appreciate the legacy of its namesake Priceline.com and its longtime TV point man William Shatner, they cringe whenever journalists and pundits associate the Group, which also includes Booking.com, Agoda, Kayak, OpenTable and several other brands, with the Negotiator. Stars of the current Priceline.com advertising campaign, William Shatner and Kaley Cuoco. REUTERS/Priceline.com As Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston told me in November: “What an asset [Priceline.com and Shatner], but on the other hand it’s a little bit of baggage for us because we’re the Priceline Group. Every time I do an interview, they show a picture of William Shatner. We’re just so much more than that. I hope people start to learn that. I love our legacy namesake business, but look, we’ve got OpenTable, Booking.com, Kayak. We’re now listed as one of the best companies to work for in the Internet segment in Fortune. That’s q...

China has been unkind to the U.S. Internet giants Google, Facebook and Amazon.com. But as a growing China spurs demand for foreign travel, Darren Huston a smaller player—Priceline Group—is trying to change the narrative. Rather than going head to head with homegrown Chinese sites, Priceline has invested more than $1 billion (via convertible debt and equity) in local travel site Ctrip, spent advertising money with search services like Baidu and Qunar to capture consumer clicks, and opened 11 offices in the country. That’s helped brighten Priceline’s outlook, pushing its stock up 13 percent in the past month and within about 6 percent of its all-time high from early 2014. (The stock has slid this week, including a 1.2 percent on Tuesday, after China surprisingly devalued its currency, raising concerns about future growth.) “Travel is such a huge business in China right now,” said Glenn Fogel, head of worldwide strategy at Norwalk, Connecticut-based Priceline. “As countries deve...

It’s hard to feel sorry for Darren Huston . After all, he runs the world’s biggest travel company which shows no signs of stopping and which has been gobbling up almost everything in its path. Let’s do the numbers first before we get to the sorry part. According to its latest financial results, announced Nov 4, third quarter gross travel bookings reached $13.8 billion, an increase of 28% over a year ago. Gross profit was $2.6 billion, 32% up on the prior year. And evidence that its international expansion is working – its international operations contributed gross profit of $2.3 billion, a 33% increase versus a year ago. Hard to feel sorry, right? But during his session at Phocuswright in Los Angeles last month, one almost did. One, Darren Huston spoke about the problems of size. Two, when asked about how he was managing Steve Hafner and the Kayak acquisition made two years ago, he said, “You don’t manage Steve.” And three, a fire alarm went off in the middle o...