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Priceline now worth $100B

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Re: Priceline now worth $100B

#151

Post by firefoxd »

For the past 2 or 3 years i saw commercials of kayak on tv. Everytime I'd be price shopping, I'd start with their website. It never worked. I couldn't understand why they would advertise on tv and then have a broken website.

You know that page where it says it is doing the price comparison in the background? That's where it always stopped for me. Frozen, never updating.

Last month, I was travelling again and went to kayak just to check. I get to that page and it's frozen again. But this time i notice the little red X on the top right corner of the browser.

> Popup blocked

I went to the next website of course, but it makes me wonder. How much money have they lost because they decided to use pop-ups for no good reasons?

Re: Priceline now worth $100B

#152

Post by wlesieutre »

raugustinus wrote: post #124
scottLobster wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should also be wondering about the lack of incentive to be a producer/owner when being a middleman is so comparatively lucrative. If capital and talent starts shifting to middlemen in pursuit of higher returns it could cause a lot of markets to stagnate with only the big players having the resources to make a profit off of producing.

Thank you for this interesting thought. My first thought was this. Why wouldn't I make furniture and sell directly to customers. Which is something I've been thinking of doing. One problem is that the computer desks I'm thinking about might not be what people want. Why? They will be expensive and it seems like the whole world thinks the IKEA desks are what they really want/need. Check some YouTube tech reviewers, the…

Or because a $1000 gaming PC is objectively better at running games than a $500 gaming PC on every single metric (except maybe power consumption), but a cheap Ikea desk can hold my keyboard and monitor at 28.5" off the floor just as well as an expensive one can.

It's nice to have solidly built furniture, but not everybody cares enough to pay a premium for that. If the demographic you're looking at is "YouTube tech reviewers" then it's especially unsurprising. Those are people who place value on having fancy tech. I wouldn't blame marketing, just a question of limited budgets and personal priorities.

I've seen some pretty cool DIY computer desks, like one where the computer components are spread out and visible over a glass top, or it's hidden away in a cabinet on the side, but it's a comparatively small number of people who care.

Re: Priceline now worth $100B

#153

Post by michaelmrose »

misterbwong wrote: post #112

If you were to tell a non-HNer that Kayak, Booking, Priceline, CheapFlights, OpenTable, and other large websites are worth 100B combined , I don't think they would even blink an eye. Come here and the top discussion thread is about how little Priceline does, how they're "just middlemen", and that they don't add any value. It's clear that HN (and techies as a whole, I assume) highly discounts the value of users, marke…

They are priced almost 50 times their earnings do they really have that much room to grow in the next several years?

Re: Priceline now worth $100B

#154

Post by [deleted] »

misterbwong wrote: post #112

If you were to tell a non-HNer that Kayak, Booking, Priceline, CheapFlights, OpenTable, and other large websites are worth 100B combined , I don't think they would even blink an eye. Come here and the top discussion thread is about how little Priceline does, how they're "just middlemen", and that they don't add any value. It's clear that HN (and techies as a whole, I assume) highly discounts the value of users, marke…

[deleted]

Re: Priceline now worth $100B

#155

Post by michaelmrose »

1zee wrote: post #133
xrange wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you were to tell a non-HNer that Kayak, Booking, Priceline, CheapFlights, OpenTable, and other large websites are worth 100B combined, I don't think they would even blink an eye. ...is that because you don't think non-HNer's don't have an appreciation for how much something like Walmart is worth (~$250B)? Or because you think they believe that $100B is a reasonable valuation? >Really is fascinating how different…

You know people that would not recognize any of those brands?

I had only heard of kayak out of the lot.

Re: Priceline now worth $100B

#156

Post by anigbrowl »

jgalt212 wrote: post #143
anigbrowl wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brands have no inherent value though; they're the consumer equivalent of religious icons. They cease to have meaning if they're not kept alive by advertising and can be destroyed by a single screw up or undermined by a clever emme. Marketing people sell value, they don't create it.

don't tell that to Warren Buffet

Warren Buffett is a wonderful person but he's the product of a mixed economy with strong institutions. My point (which could have been better made) is that brands depend heavily on social infrastructure for their survival

Put it this way, suppose the C-suite and the board at Priceline went insane and wiped all their own servers before leaping out of their penthouse windows. It would disrupt the travel industry, but it wouldn't be that difficult to build another price aggregation network - the infrastructure is already there. And a year later, nobody would care.

Consumers aren't nearly as invested in brands as marketing people like to imagine, they're just lazy and stick with whatever works OK. Can you imagine consumers feeling sad about the demise of Priceline or any other major brand? If Geico went out of business I'd feel a little bit of nostalgia for those animated gecko commercials and might reminisce that they were a good company to do business with, but that's about it.

Re: Priceline now worth $100B

#157

Post by maxxxxx »

nerdponx wrote: post #57
wheaties wrote: post #16

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?

Of course Priceline has assets: - Software - Computing infrastructure - Domain expertise - Deals and relationships with business partners - Mountains of proprietary data, including historical pricing/availability and user behavior.

The last three are the ones that have the real value.

Re: Priceline now worth $100B

#158

Post by untog »

firefoxd wrote: post #151

For the past 2 or 3 years i saw commercials of kayak on tv. Everytime I'd be price shopping, I'd start with their website. It never worked. I couldn't understand why they would advertise on tv and then have a broken website. You know that page where it says it is doing the price comparison in the background? That's where it always stopped for me. Frozen, never updating. Last month, I was travelling again and went to…

There's a principle that I try to apply in situations like this: giving other developers some credit.

By which, I mean that if every Kayak search was frozen, for every user, I believe that the developers over there would have caught that and fixed it. If a meaningful number of people were experiencing freeze errors, I also expect they would have caught it.

Is it possible the problem is your browser setup, and this is not an experience other people have?

Re: Priceline now worth $100B

#159

Post by davidjnelson »

coldcode wrote: post #91
tiffanyh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to compound this, Sabre - which nearly everyone in the industry uses to actually get there hotel/airline/car rental inventory from only has a $6B market cap. https://www.google.com/finance?cid=55290057921840 Said another. The company technology that powers the whole travel industry is worth less than 10% of just Priceline.

Sabre is one of three. I think more of Priceline is powered by a competitor.

I believe they are Galileo and Apollo.

Re: Priceline now worth $100B

#160

Post by coredog64 »

nemo44x wrote: post #113
_ea1k wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and they these middlemen also give hotels a way to sell lesser service and blame the middleman. Going through the third-party often loses membership perks and amenities and generally also makes cancellation much harder, in exchange for a lesser rate. If the hotel offered the lesser rate themselves, they would effectively be pricing their "free" amenities, and they don't want to do that.

It's not that they "don't" want to do that - in fact they'd very much like to. It's that they can't do it. Their agreements with listing services prohibit this. And if they don't get listed then they simply won't get the same rate of bookings. Generally they are paying around 20% of the booking fee to the listing service. So in theory the hotel would be able to charge 15% less on their own site and make a larger prof…

The loophole in those agreements is that the best price that listing services show is the best "public" price. Larger hotel chains are working around that by offering lower prices to their loyalty club members.
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