Skift Take
Barry Diller, the senior executive at both IAC and Expedia, doesn't need any more plaques on his mansions' walls but he is one of the people who had oversized influence in making online travel what it is today. He had a great eye for how e-commerce would emerge and he pulled the trigger on his great acquisitions.
Skift launched its largest and most ambitious project yet, The Definitive Oral History of Online Travel, on June 1.
In nearly 40,000 words founders, CEOs, other executives and insiders tell a story in their own words about the creation of Internet giants such as Expedia, Priceline, Travelocity, Orbitz, TripAdvisor and more.
Not all of the interviews fit into the big story so we are publishing standalone stories that offer deeper insight into information we collected during the three-month research process.
In the annals of online travel, many people are familiar with how Jeffery Boyd, currently the interim CEO of the Priceline Group, turned around a teetering Priceline.com in the early 2000s, and in tandem with Glenn Fogel, head of worldwide strategy and planning, acquired Active Hotels in 2004, added on Bookings B.V. the following year, merged them to create Booking.com, and developed a $68 billion juggernaut.
Perhaps less well-known as a game-changing acquisition team is another duo, the tandem of IAC and Expedia chairman Barry Diller, and Expedia Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who was the chief financial officer and deal-hunter during their pre-Expedia days from 1999 to 2005.
Consider the acquisitions they identified and made: Hotel Reservations Network (1999), Expedia (2002), Hotwire (2003), China's eLong, and TripAdvisor (both 2004).
Diller's IAC paired Hotel Reservations Network, which was renamed Hotels.com, with Expedia, and created a merchant-model hotel-booking powerhouse that made mega margins and earned the wrath of the hotel industry despite the fact that the Hotels.com and Expedia teams took awhile to get over their competitive enmity for one another.
To his credit, Diller and his IAC went ahead in early 2002 and acquired a controlling stake in Expedia when the flames of September 11 and the toll it took on the travel economy were still reflexive recollections. As Khosrowshahi remembers: "And we talked it over and I remember someone at the meeting – Barry and I still debate who it was – said, 'If there's no travel, there's no life. It's going to come back. Expedia is going to be an important part of it. So either the whole world is going to blow up or we're going to be OK and who knows how long it will take, but we'll be OK.'"
Diller and Khosrowshahi didn't catch all the deals -- and one in particular was an historic oversight. IAC's Expedia decided not to acquire Bookings.nl and thought TripAdvisor was too risky bec
