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

Avsnitt(213)

Special: Amazon Unbound (with Brad Stone)

Special: Amazon Unbound (with Brad Stone)

Brad Stone joins us to discuss the making of the modern Amazon, and how it's morphed from the "flywheel company" of The Everything Store into a set of interlocking and self-reinforcing businesses that...

27 Maj 20211h 19min

Berkshire Hathaway Part II

Berkshire Hathaway Part II

In Part II of our Berkshire Hathaway Trilogy (!), we pick up the story with Warren wandering in the woods of Omaha, searching for his life's next chapter after retiring from the professional investing...

12 Maj 20213h 3min

Special: 2021 China Tech Trends (with Tech Buzz China)

Special: 2021 China Tech Trends (with Tech Buzz China)

We team up with two of the very best English-language analysts covering China tech today, Rui Ma and Ying Lu from the Tech Buzz China podcast, to talk about the big trends happening on the ground in C...

5 Maj 20211h 21min

Berkshire Hathaway Part I

Berkshire Hathaway Part I

It's time. After 150+ episodes on great companies, we tackle the granddaddy of them all — Berkshire Hathaway. One episode alone isn't nearly enough to do Warren and Poor Charlie justice, so today we p...

21 Apr 20213h 12min

Special: "Why Now" for Digital Health (with Levels founder Josh Clemente)

Special: "Why Now" for Digital Health (with Levels founder Josh Clemente)

We dive into the fast-changing world of direct-to-consumer digital health, with perhaps the best person in the world: Levels founder Josh Clemente. (Shoutout to Ben Grynol and Michael Mizrahi from our...

6 Apr 20211h 28min

Rec Room Part II (with CEO Nick Fajt)

Rec Room Part II (with CEO Nick Fajt)

Last Acquired left the plucky Rec Room crew in our 2018 "Part I" episode, they were a seed stage startup making a VR game that users loved but grew slowly and barely monetized. Fast forward to today, ...

24 Mars 20211h 58min

Meituan

Meituan

We dive into the history behind Meituan, the juggernaut Chinese "super-app" which dominates China's services economy, offering consumers everything from food delivery, restaurant reviews, travel booki...

10 Mars 20212h 23min

The New York Times Company

The New York Times Company

For the entire 20th Century, you’d be hard pressed to find a better business than an American newspaper — Warren Buffett famously described them as “franchises” — and no American newspaper stood talle...

18 Feb 20213h 9min

Populärt inom Business & ekonomi

framgangspodden
varvet
badfluence
rss-jossan-nina
rss-borsens-finest
rss-svart-marknad
svd-tech-brief
avanzapodden
uppgang-och-fall
fill-or-kill
rss-inga-dumma-fragor-om-pengar
borsmorgon
rss-dagen-med-di
lastbilspodden
bathina-en-podcast
rss-kort-lang-analyspodden-fran-di
affarsvarlden
market-makers
rss-den-nya-ekonomin
borslunch-2