David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's a huge number. That’s why Trip Advisor would tell you they’ve got hotel reviews. So again, that's kind of the biggest sample of hotels. But the GDS only has about 75,000 hotels on it, varies a little bit from GDS to GDS. But the kinds of hotels that are generally on the GDS are, well, going back to our example, it’s the Hiltons of the world, it’s the Marriotts of the world. It’s the kind of hotels that get booked by travel agents which tend to be stayed in by business travelers or folks that historically accessed travel agents and so they were franchised and more sophisticated and had better technology. It wasn’t a 20-room pensione outside of room which is much more commonly used by the European traveler. That really speaks to – we’ll get into this throughout the episode but the differentiation and the value that Booking was able to build while it was really hard in the beginning and we’ll get to they end up getting acquired by Priceline in 2005 for $133 million, I mean, nobody recognized the value here. But because they were able to build this proprietary longtail marketplace of supply, they really had something no one else could access. It reminds me in a lot of ways of the difference between Google and Yahoo. Like on Google, you could type a query on Google and they had access to the entire longtail of the internet whereas Yahoo with the directory model only had the head. So for people, Drew, like you were saying, you’re looking for something specific in Europe, it was Booking or nothing. A hundred percent. I think that's a great analogy. Where that really becomes clear, I guess we’re kind of jumping ahead –…

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