Booking Holdings

Brett Keller, Priceline.com's new interim CEO, knows his way around headquarters, having worked there for 17 years. He takes over at a critical time for the Priceline.com brand, although Booking.com is by far the Priceline Group's most important cog.

Booking.com rode the agency model, which is attractive for its lack of complexity in forging online travel agency-hotel relationships and consumer-friendliness, into the growth engine of a $68 billion business. Its executives did so by ignoring the trendiness of the crowds and sticking to their own beliefs and vision.

We're not giving away all the good stuff. You still need to read the entire thing.

Two decades after the birth of online travel, more than two dozen founders and key players exclusively tell Skift how it all happened. This is a story of a history that changed the future of travel forever. Dig in, this will take a while.

TripAdvisor's new booking product leans heavily on Priceline's Booking.com — more so than TripAdvisor would probably like.

It is rare to see a company such as the Priceline Group take an impairment charge so quickly after investing. Even Priceline, in the short-term, at least, can get things wrong. Hotel Urbano needs more cash as the Brazilian economy and political system exhibited further stress, and the Zika virus took hold.

The Priceline Group is looking for a CEO who can handle disruption and big changes in technology and market conditions in coming years. Just look at the changes in the Group's accommodations mix as lodging alternatives are approaching half of the company's roster of properties.

Now-former Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston's decision to emphasize organic growth, his insistence that all properties sold on Booking.com be online bookable and instantly confirmable, and his strategy to keep Booking.com solely focused on the hotel business all set his tenure apart from those of his peers at Expedia. If you can set aside his apparently reckless behavior for a moment, it's a shame Huston won't be around to see his strategy through or to pivot, as required.

To some extent, Expedia is molding HomeAway to its liking. Unlike Booking.com (for now, at least), HomeAway is backing off its goal of making all vacation rentals online bookable. Expedia is also adding apartments in urban areas to better compete against Airbnb and Booking.com.

We pause our argument for the moment that the Priceline Group should be rebranded as the Booking.com Group because of the latter's wider brand recognition. The Priceline Group, which actually has no plans under way to rebrand, needs to get this messy Booking.com trademark issue cleared up first. It seems like such a stretch that one of the largest travel companies in the world can't get its trademark approved.