Complete Interview: Priceline CEO on Staying in High Gear
Photo Credit: Priceline CEO Darren Huston. Priceline
Skift Take
When Huston took over as CEO of the Priceline Group 13 months ago, a financial analyst told us that Huston would play it safe and not make any bold moves in his first year at the helm because he needed to assure Wall Street about his leadership. Boy, was that analyst wrong.
Editor’s Note: Skift published a series of interviews with online travel CEOs talking about the Future of Travel Booking, and we turned it into our first e-book. It was only fitting that Darren Huston, the guy who as the top guy at the Priceline Group generated so many headlines in 2014, closed out the series with a flourish.
Here is his interview, which is now online in full for the first time.
Darren Huston, the CEO of the Priceline Group, admits that he and his team are data junkies and in parsing the data, he points to Google as the Group’s most efficient marketing partner.
More effective than Bing, Yandex, Baidu and, by implication, even Kayak.
Still, Huston says the Priceline Group’s Booking.com, Priceline.com, and Kayak have supplemented digital marketing with television advertising, where data metrics are less transparent. “It was a natural outcome in some ways because Google is having harder times growing as fast as we need to grow, so we're sourcing d
