Topic: How To Invest

What do you think about Priceline? Thanks.

Article Excerpt

Priceline, $1,236.83, symbol PCLN on Nasdaq (Shares outstanding: 52.1 million; Market cap: $64.0 billion; www.priceline.com), is an online travel company that offers airline tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals, vacation packages and cruises. Customers can either buy in the traditional, price-disclosed manner or use the company’s ‘‘Name Your Own Price’’ service, which lets them make their own offers. Priceline then collects the offers and matches them against its database of seller inventory. The company operates the Priceline.com website, as well as Bookings.com, Agoda.com and RentalCars.com. It also bought travel search engine Kayak for $1.8 billion last year. Kayak compiles airline and hotel prices from a number of travel websites and generates considerable traffic for Priceline’s other web sites. It also keeps it from having to depend heavily on Google for search traffic. In the three months ended December 31, 2013, Priceline’s revenue rose 29.4%, to $1.54 billion from $1.19 billion a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, earnings per share gained 30.1%, to $8.85 from…