Acquired trains its lens on the “second or third best acquisition of all-time”, Priceline’s 2005 purchase of Booking.com. Our heroes are joined by friend-of-the-show and former Jetsetter & Room 77 CEO Drew Patterson to help understand how this little-known startup from The Netherlands grew into the largest travel company in the world, with nearly $8B in annual revenue. Was this deal even better than Instagram??? We debate, hotly.

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Topics covered include:

The biggest startup you’ve never heard of (in the US), Booking.com, and its parent company Priceline (yes, the William Shatner Priceline)
Booking’s founding in Amsterdam in late 1996: by recent college graduate Geert-Jan Bruinsma
Skift.com’s Definitive Oral History of Online Travel
The travel industry's GDS's (“Global Distribution Systems”) and the development of Sabre
How Bruinsma raised the initial money for Booking: by emailing anyone he know who had an email address
OTAs ("Online Travel Agencies”) and how they operate; the "merchant model" versus the “agency model"
The role of search in online travel
Bill Gurley on Conversion: The Most Important Internet Metric of All
Expedia’s early flirtation with Booking, and decision not to acquire the company
Priceline head of M&A Glenn Fogel’s vision for how powerful the agency model for OTAs could become in Europe
Priceline and Glenn's 2004 acquisition of Active Hotels in the UK, followed by the 2005 acquisition of Booking for $133M and the combination of the two businesses into Booking.com
Booking’s incredible growth in the decade since the acquisition, from less than 20M room-nights to over 500M, and $7.8B in revenue in 2016

The Carve Out:

Ben: Scott Forstall talking about the original iPhone at the Computer History Museum
David: The Big Sick
Drew: Bloomberg’s Money Stuff by Matt Levine

Episode 41: Booking.com with Jetsetter & Room 77 CEO Drew Patterson

Acquired