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

Episoder(212)

Nintendo: The Console Wars

Nintendo: The Console Wars

In the 1980’s Nintendo was on top of the world, with the NES achieving over 90% market share of home video games globally. So how did they fall ALL the way down to ~10% in just a few short console gen...

11 Apr 20233h 19min

Interview: Hamilton Helmer & Chenyi Shi on How to Build an AWS-Like Second Business

Interview: Hamilton Helmer & Chenyi Shi on How to Build an AWS-Like Second Business

7 Powers author Hamilton Helmer and his Strategy Capital colleague Chenyi Shi join us again to discuss their latest research on a topic that’s highly relevant to the recent Acquired canon: how to buil...

4 Apr 20231h 31min

Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast)

Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast)

ACQ Sessions returns with David Senra of the Founders Podcast. David is one of our very favorite people in the world — it’s impossible to spend an hour (or 3!) with him and not come away inspired to g...

29 Mar 20233h 20min

Nintendo's Origins

Nintendo's Origins

You may think you know the Nintendo story: a plumber named Mario, a princess named Zelda… and didn’t they buy the Seattle Mariners at some point? We thought we knew it too. And then we started researc...

16 Mar 20233h 27min

LVMH

LVMH

We tell the full history of LVMH, and how Bernard Arnault turned a $15m investment in a bankrupt French textile company into the world’s largest individual fortune. It’s a story that’s equal parts Ber...

21 Feb 20233h 33min

Holiday Special 2022

Holiday Special 2022

Cozy up to the fire and join Acquired as we do our annual strategic review of the show and our business “in public”. We recap our perspectives on Acquired’s big moments from the past year, a bit of co...

19 Des 20222h 21min

Stratechery (with Ben Thompson)

Stratechery (with Ben Thompson)

Ben Thompson joins Acquired to discuss the business of Stratechery itself and celebrate 10 years (!) of the internet’s best strategy analysis destination. Even beyond Stratechery’s enormous impact its...

6 Des 20221h 56min

Enron

Enron

The FTX fraud has dominated headlines now for weeks, during which we’ve debated if and how Acquired could uniquely add to the conversation. Then we realized there was an angle so perfect that we had t...

29 Nov 20223h 34min

Populært innen Business og økonomi

lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
stopp-verden
dine-penger-pengeradet
e24-podden
rss-penger-polser-og-politikk
rss-borsmorgen-okonominyhetene
utbytte
pengesnakk
pengepodden-2
finansredaksjonen
livet-pa-veien-med-jan-erik-larssen
tid-er-penger-en-podcast-med-peter-warren
morgenkaffen-med-finansavisen
rss-sunn-okonomi
okonomiamatorene
lederpodden
rss-markedspuls-2
rss-andelige-tanker-med-camillo
rss-fa-makro
rss-investering-gjort-enkelt