Episode 41: Booking.com with Jetsetter & Room 77 CEO Drew Patterson
Acquired26 Heinä 2017

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

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.

Sponsors:


More Acquired!

© Copyright 2015-2025 ACQ, LLC


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:

Jaksot(213)

Formula 1

Formula 1

Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from sc...

2 Maalis 4h 29min

The NFL

The NFL

The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and sometimes Saturdays an...

27 Tammi 4h 17min

Rolex

Rolex

Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger than ever in history!...

3 Tammi 4h 59min

Costco

Costco

Costco is not only Charlie Munger’s favorite company of all time (plus he’s on the board, natch), it’s an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite characteristics can combine to create i...

2 Tammi 3h 1min

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have guests or video. Hardly the st...

15 Joulu 20252h 47min

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is… sugar water. And somehow it’s also America, Christmas, summertime, friendship and happiness. Today we tell the story of how The Coca-Cola Company amazingly transmogrified a beverage into...

24 Marras 20254h 4min

Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe's breaks every rule of modern retail. They don't do e-commerce. They don't do delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They only stock 4,000 SKUs versus 50,000+ at normal supermark...

27 Loka 20253h 28min

Google Part III: The AI Company

Google Part III: The AI Company

Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). T...

6 Loka 20254h 6min

Suosittua kategoriassa Liike-elämä ja talous

sijotuskasti
mimmit-sijoittaa
rss-rahapodi
psykopodiaa-podcast
rss-rahamania
taloudellinen-mielenrauha
ostan-asuntoja-podcast
herrasmieshakkerit
rahapuhetta
juristipodi
rss-draivi
rss-sami-miettinen-neuvottelija
asuntoasiaa-paivakirjat
rss-lahtijat
rss-seuraava-potilas
rss-paasipodi
pomojen-suusta
rss-h-asselmoilanen
rss-rikasta-elamaa
rss-markkinointitrippi