Ceo Journal

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...

PhoCusWright has unveiled a pioneering programme forPhoCusWright@ITB, which takes place on March 7 in conjunction with ITB Berlin. This conference-in-a-conference is designed to help executives capitalise on key trends impacting the travel, tourism and hospitality marketplace. This year’s theme, Travel Unleashed: Any. Every. Always. heralds the exceptional forces liberating the travel marketplace. Amidst rapid advances in technology, constant change is the norm, and empowered, hyper-connected consumers are engaging with information and organizations in entirely new ways. PhoCusWright@ITB also features interviews with the CEOs of two of Europe’s leading online travel agencies, Darren Huston of Booking.com and Javier Perez-Tenessa of the recently formed ODIGEO. Read full article @ https://www.webintravel.com/phocuswrightitb-features-key-european-travel-leaders/