Business Is Doubled Said Darren Huston

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Business Is Doubled Said Darren Huston Darren
Huston on CNBC discussed the Pricelines global
business and the companys plans for
international growth. Darren Huston
Now, I think for a lot of Americans, they think
of Priceline as name your own price. William
Shatner, of course, we also have Kayak, but our
business is more than 80 percent
international. In fact, gross profit, 88 percent
is earned outside the United States. So being a
Booking dot com, which is really the principal
subsidiary of the group, is an important place
to be. And we're a very global business. And
there's not a better place than Amsterdam to run
a global business.
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Simon
I mean, the value is in the fact that for so long
people have counted the streets in Europe to get
those hotels with relationships with booking dot
com. And that's quite unique. So this is a true
online travel agency, not a massive search
platform.
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Darren Huston
Yeah, exactly I mean, being an online travel
agency is an all spreadsheets and technology.
It's actually a lot about managing connections
on the street. Also dealing with customer, we
have over 3000 people that speak over 42
languages helping customers travel around the
world. So there's a lot of hard work to being a
traveller.
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Simon
Let's talk about the stock price moves. I think
you've lost over 200 on your stock price.
You've gone from 70 billion to 60 billion in
market capitalization. I mean, how do you feel
about that? Well, you like the CEO of Netflix or
tested or felt that the stock was overvalued.
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Darren Huston
Yeah, you know, when I started the group three
years ago, this stock has since then tripled.
The business has more than doubled. We actually
look back to the heyday of the Internet. The
stock has actually gone up over one hundred acts.
So this is a short term issue where we focus on
completely as how do we drive great business,
how do we continue to grow, how do we continue to
drive?
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Simon
It must have implications, for example. The
speculation is that you would buy a home and
away Home Away forgive me, which is which is
vacation rentals booking operation out of
Texas. If I have a look at that stock, it's done
really badly recently, presumably because you
guys don't necessarily have the currency and
moment to do the transaction. Oye so blurred. I
mean would you buy that stock?
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Darren Huston
You know, we focused mostly on organic growth of
the group. We have made transactions over the
years. They usually happen fairly infrequently,
like the Kayaked transaction last year. But a lot
of our growth is driven organically. And as we
expand the type of accommodations we work with
being hostels, resorts, motels. It's also
brought us into the vacation rental space. So
some people speculate things that we might do,
but we're just continually to organically
execute our increase in accommodations on our
main platform.