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Interesting, it seems like a company that had a very inflated valuation due to the dot-com bubble, was hit very hard when the bubble burst and it took almost 15 years for the stock price to get back to pre-bubble level...
I used to code for a hotel chain, and I remember that Priceline had some sort of weird legacy deal that made them essentially the only OTA (online travel agent) that was able to undercut the hotel's lowest price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opaque_travel_inventory
Basically, in exchange for a lower price, the hotel guest gives up their right to choose which hotel they want to stay at. And for the hotel, they get to sell lower priced rooms without advertising lower prices, enabling them to engage in price discrimination so they don't lose out on the people willing to pay them more.
However, I find that the type of hotel guest Opaque pricing attracts is not a desirable hotel guest anyway, so most decent hotels don't participate. Or if they do, only when demand is very low and they're sitting empty.
Why did you get downvoted? Priceline PR team?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've probably heard of Booking.com
Actually no. Why is it so popular? It seems to have fewer features than hipmunk.... Not to knock them, though, it's a hard problem to solve well from an interface and integrations perspective.
They have a huge inventory of hotels, and they have a functional, fairly responsive search interface that isn't annoying. The last part is important — there's little in terms of popups, ads, intrusive upsells, flashy UI elements, and so on. It's not the most modern, but it's very well optimized towards finding stuff. For example, the path to seeing photos is very short (Hipmunk also does well here).
Since they're very popular, they also have the benefit of having a large repository of reviews, and I find it easier than other sites to glean, from reviews and scores, how good a hotel is compared to others. TripAdvisor comes close, but is too annoying.
Hipmunk is okay, but scores lower on usability for me than Booking.com.
This is stupid. Really. Here we are in a world where the companies that own the assets (you know, the things that cost a lot of money) are worth less than the things that don't own anything. This doesn't seem "right" or "fair" in the sense that Priceline should be a middleman, unable to exercise any or all pricing power because it does not control the assets producing the revenue. I wonder how long this can last?
This is stupid. Really. Here we are in a world where the companies that own the assets (you know, the things that cost a lot of money) are worth less than the things that don't own anything. This doesn't seem "right" or "fair" in the sense that Priceline should be a middleman, unable to exercise any or all pricing power because it does not control the assets producing the revenue. I wonder how long this can last?
Interesting, it seems like a company that had a very inflated valuation due to the dot-com bubble, was hit very hard when the bubble burst and it took almost 15 years for the stock price to get back to pre-bubble level...
Do you mean "rebubble," or is there some reason Priceline should be worth $100bn?
They do about $400-500m in profit(?) a quarter, for $1.5-2bn/year. Is it the 22% margin that's so attractive? (https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3APCLN&fstype=ii&ei=...)
Such a large margin might suggest they aren't making significant hardware purchases or that their rates could be undercut by a competitor, both of which would make me nervous as an investor for the long haul.
Why did you get downvoted? Priceline PR team?
Not too bothered about it!