51–60 of 77 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should clarify that "Priceline" is primarily Booking.com, not the amusing pricing opacity company out of CT (even if they did make the good decision to buy Booking.com years back).
Do you have a source that most of their traffic is from booking.com?
3 weeks ago, Expedia acquired Travelocity for $280M. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/expedia-buys-traveloc... This Orbitz deal ($1.6B) makes the Travelocity deal ($280M) look cheap.
3 weeks ago, Expedia acquired Travelocity for $280M. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/expedia-buys-traveloc... This Orbitz deal ($1.6B) makes the Travelocity deal ($280M) look cheap.
Edit, sources:
> Sparks was brought in a couple of years ago to turn around the company, which needed a wholesale upgrading of its back-end systems in order to make a go of it, but apparently the transition fell short. [1]
[1] http://skift.com/2013/08/22/travelocity-gives-in-sites-to-be...
All these sites seem to use the exact same backend services, so it's difficult to care. About the only site I use regularly is hotels.com because they have a loyalty scheme (book 10 nights, get 1 free) - and even then I'm sure there's some catch I'm not aware of that makes them the same as everyone else.
The catch, in my anecdotal experience, is that third parties have terrible integration with the hotels. In some cases, they fax a reservation using a company credit card, to pay on your behalf. End result is some percent of the time, this gets messed up and you end up dealing with an annoyed person on check in that sometimes ends up having to get the agency on the line to sort it out. Same for flight bookings. I've n…
1. For hotels, where the hotel itself doesn't actually have an online-booking system. Not very common in the U.S., but common among smaller hotels in Europe. Often a third party (most often booking.com) is the only way to book these hotels online.
2. For flights, where Orbitz or Expedia are able to put together a multi-airline itinerary that I can't get those airlines' own sites to return. The last time I used Orbitz was for this reason: it was able to come up with a round-trip ATL-CPH with Delta one way and KLM the other way, with a good price and times that were convenient for me. The fare rules work because they're partner airlines (so it ends up billed as a round-trip, not two one-ways), but I couldn't manage to get either the KLM or Delta websites to offer me that combination, despite quite a bit of fiddling.
In all cash deals like this, is there just a bank wire transfer that's made in the purchase amount from one company's account to the other's once everything has been approved and the deal has closed?
The end result was a balance somewhere in the order of $1.5B AUD - the number overflowed the little shaded box for balances.
Perhaps entirely unsurprisingly, the case that this bank statement was being used in? "ATO vs [Client]" (ATO being the Australian Tax Office) for "deficiencies in income declaration"...
I interviewed at a travel company last year. It was interesting because they didn't do any of the backend booking stuff (for flights), but instead seemed to like to direct you to other sites to book and then take a referal cut if you buy. This was a weird business where the person buying the travel was the product (I didn't like it). Expedia is one of the direct bookers. I use them. The UI is not pretty but functiona…
I think Hipmunk (the site founded by some of the Reddit founders) works like that. It's not unusual though. Here in the UK, things like insurance and utilities are increasingly sold in this way (we call them "price comparison" sites). I believe(?) Shazam also makes most of its money by referrals to iTunes and Amazon.
3 weeks ago, Expedia acquired Travelocity for $280M. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/expedia-buys-traveloc... This Orbitz deal ($1.6B) makes the Travelocity deal ($280M) look cheap.
Aren't Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity some of the biggest online travel sites?