Priceline: Hoteliers should get out of technology
Darren Huston, president & CEO of Amsterdam-based OTA Priceline Group, was a guest speaker at ITB Berlin last week
The duopoly of Expedia and Priceline now control about 85 per cent of the online hotel booking market in Australia.
Huston stressed Priceline had to keep “milking the cow” to survive in the OTA “farm”.
Our employees are workhorses, not show ponies and you have to keep milking the cow. If you stop, they stop giving milk. You have to work the system like a farm,” said Huston.
He said, “Everyone is an innovator. The 13,000 employees worldwide are broken up into small teams and how innovation happens from the bottom. The Booking.com website is broken into 40 pieces run by 40 teams. “At any moment, thousands of experiments are happening, they don’t come to me for approval.
“If the test is significant in driving conversions and loyalty, then it goes onto the site. If it doesn’t, then they have to figure out what’s wrong.”
“The work we do is very complicated – it’s a dynamic space, it changes at a rapid pace. Players change very fast and customers change even faster. You need to build scale systems to handle all the stuff that happens in the real world.”
“We are the king of direct response and Google is the world’s biggest platform. But even Google is not growing fast enough and we need more platforms.”
Which is why Booking.com has taken to television advertising mainly in the US, Germany and Australia.
“Booking.com now sees 100,000 transactions a day on mobile,” he said. “The behaviour has changed so much, if you are not relevant on mobile, you are not relevant.”
Of accommodation providers Houston said, What we want to do is get them out of technology into the hotel business.”
