Priceline Group has grown to be a titan of the online travel segment through its acquisitions; would Rocketmiles be a well-considered one, or a careless impulse buy amid a general shopping frenzy?
Small buy for a big guy
As far as Priceline Group acquisitions go, this potential deal is relatively tiny. It pales next to the company's $1.8 billion purchase of flight booking site Kayak.com in 2012, not to mention the $2.6 billion it spent to grab OpenTable last year ... and that isn't even a travel site.
The Khan to Priceline Group's Captain Kirk (no, I can't resist the William Shatner analogies) is Expedia, which committed $1.6 billion in a deal to buy fellow online travel conglomerate Orbitz Worldwide mere days before the Priceline Group/Rocketmiles would-be deal was reported. And this came on the heels of another Expedia acquisition, the $280 million purchase of Travelocity.