Booking Holdings: From Priceline Grocery Bids to 1.2 Billion Room Nights

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Jay S. Walker founded Priceline.com in 1996 in Stamford, Connecticut, around its trademarked name-your-own-price model: customers entered a destination, dates and a price, handed over a credit card and waited to see if an airline or hotel accepted. Suppliers could unload perishable seats and rooms without publicly cutting rates. The March 31, 1999 IPO jumped 331 percent on day one, making Walker, who held 35 percent, a multi-billionaire. Priceline then applied bidding to mortgages, cars, groceries and gasoline, and by 2000 all of those experiments were discontinued.

The turn came in Europe: Priceline bought ActiveHotels.com for $161 million in September 2004 and Booking.com for about $133 to $135 million in July 2005, merging them and moving to an agency model that takes a commission without holding rooms. Agoda followed in 2007, then TravelJigsaw (renamed Rentalcars.com) in 2010, Kayak for $1.8 billion in 2013, OpenTable for $2.6 billion in 2014 and Momondo and Cheapflights for $550 million in 2017. The parent became Booking Holdings in February 2018, ticker BKNG. CEO Darren Huston resigned in April 2016 over an undisclosed relationship with an employee, and Glenn D. Fogel took over in January 2017.

• Revenue fell from $15 billion in 2019 to $6.7 billion in 2020, with only $60 million in profit, as marketing costs dropped with demand.
• By 2025 the Norwalk, Connecticut, company reported $26.9 billion in revenue and $5.4 billion in net income.
• Its 2025 bookings included 68 million airline tickets, 88 million rental car days and 1.235 billion room nights.
• European regulators blocked its 2021 bid for flight booking company Gotogate in 2023.
• It bought Getaroom for $1.2 billion in 2022, and in 2026 OpenTable acquired the Canadian platform Libro.