Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…So you can see why you’re the Expedia board and you say, “This doesn’t seem like the right model here. These crazy Booking guys started by this college student, they have no idea what they’re doing.” And to have some sympathy for them at the time, right? They were on top of the world. Travelocity had been the leading player, Expedia displaced them. Expedia recognized I think one of the interesting things about OTAs, when you look at their economics, what drives their business, it’s really the hotel business that drives their profitability. It’s a much more profitable piece of business than flights. Expedia recognized that early. Bought a company called Travelscape which was one of these kind of early merchant businesses. Then turned around and bought HRN which became Hotels.com which as it happened was powering the hotel business on Travelocity. So it’s kind of a master stroke. They completely undermined their competitor and they identified what the most profitable and exciting part of the business is and they controlled it all. This is like when Google bought Overture.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.