Articles tagged “priceline”

Little can stop Google Flights and Hotels from continuing to take market share because of Google’s speedy response time, enhanced focus on user experience, and position as a dominant search engine — except the looming threat of regulation.

The Priceline Group's new emphasis on TV is unpleasant news for metasearch enterprises such as Trivago, Google, and TripAdvisor. The TV ads are an online travel agency version of a direct-booking campaign.

Anyone who thought the three new online travel agency leaders — Jane Sun, Glenn Fogel, and Mark Okerstrom — intended to be mere caretakers of their predecessors’ policies and legacies would have been mistaken. To a large degree, they are stepping out into new territory.

Whether or not you agree with this, it's certainly an idea worth contemplating as everyone and everything in the travel industry are beginning to converge. Whatever you decide, please don't shoot the messenger.

It's no surprise that Priceline's CEO expects mobile use for everything in travel to increase. The question is what the online travel company plans to do about it.

What do a debate over landing pages, the acquisition of Momondo, a shift into hotel software services, and regulators forcing changes in online travel agency contracts have in common? Each of those seemingly unrelated things may have pushed Priceline to toggle back its spending on Trivago.

Did we just see an elephant fly? The Priceline Group, which is the largest spender on digital advertising in travel, just said TV commercials may be a better way to attract loyal customers. That's even more surprising than TV-happy Trivago's recent announcement that it would start devoting more resources to digital advertising. Don't you love this industry?

The Priceline Group is in the catbird seat in online travel — for now — while Expedia is a much smaller company with so much ground to make up. Expedia's Okerstrom is laudably talking tough about his ambitions to propel his company forward. But 2017, so far, has been anything but easy for the two newbie CEOs.

The deal shows the pragmatism of Priceline Group's new CEO toward China. Glenn Fogel chose to sync up with an additional local player rather than rely just on its existing partnership with Ctrip.

We've heard for several years how travel brands will use new technology to make travel seamless. We wish it would happen next year. But it sounds like we'll have to wait awhile. Perhaps someday we'll get there.