Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston touts his company’s organic growth versus Expedia Inc.’s strategy of mostly acquiring companies that need to be put back on track. Rest assured, however, that Priceline would plunk down a few billion dollars on the right acquisition target. It just wasn’t HomeAway, and TripAdvisor and Airbnb are too expensive.
Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston says his company didn’t get involved when HomeAway put itself up for sale because “we’re quite picky” and HomeAway’s model of allowing vacation rental owners to wait 24 hours before confirming a booking and charging travelers a booking fee “just didn’t fit us.”
These were among the more newsy points that Huston made when Skift conducted a one-one-one interview [in full, below] with him at the Phocuswright conference in Hollywood, Florida, on November 18.
Expedia Inc. announced November 4 that it would acquire HomeAway for $3.9 billion in cash and stock. Asked whether the Priceline Group got involved in that sales process, Huston said: “No. Although we’ve talked to them for years. We were very much aware of it. We knew kind of how it was going. We did a little bit of thinking and said this isn’t the right thing for us. We’re quite picky.”
