Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you, Ladies and Gentleman, at this time we will begin the question and answer session. Just a reminder, if you have a question, please press the * key followed by the 1 on your touchtone phone.
If you would like to withdraw your question, press the * key followed by the 2. We do ask that if you’re on a speaker phone that you please lift up the handset before making your selection.
And our first question comes from Robert Peck at Bear Stearns, please go ahead.
Robert Peck - Bear Stearns
Hey guys, congratulations, strong quarter.
I just wanted to dig to a couple of the details here. First of all, could you comment a little bit on hotels.com and it seems its growth decelerated to about 12% from sort of the 20% levels. Could you talk about what’s going on there? And sort of bigger picture, how can you accelerate domestic growth? Can you maybe provide a little more color on what’s causing some of the pressure? I just have a follow up.
Dara Khosrowshahi
Sure Bob, just on hotels.com, as far as the growth goes, really, the growth that we saw this year, and it was great growth domestically, had two significant factors associated with it.
One was the marketing campaign, the expert marketing campaign and the improved homepage design. And the second was the plugging in of hotels.com into the common supply infrastructure that we built, into the PFG group that we built.
The plugging in into the new supply got hotels.com much better inventory, better quality inventory, some hotel chains that in the past had not done business with hotels.com. And if you look at the growth rate, and year on year growth rates, once you lap that benefit, once you lap that plugging in, into the new supply, and once you lap? call it an entirely new website, growth becomes a little more difficult to come by.
If you look at last year, really the reacceleration of hotels.com started happening in Q4 of last year. We’re lapping those comps right now, so growth going forward is going to be a little harder to come by, but we think that the team over there is very much focused on it. And we think what’s important is that over the long term they can build a brand that thrives, a brand that keeps growing, a brand that amongst consumers if they’re just looking for a hotel. And we think that they’re certainly up for that.
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