Former Sabre exec Traci Mercer on her new role at Priceline

Traci Mercer has spent more than 25 years in the travel industry, starting in hospitality at Red Lion Hotels and Hilton, then moving to Expedia and, for the last six years, as a senior vice president at Sabre. 

In April, Mercer became senior vice president and head of accommodations for Priceline, one of Booking Holdings’ online travel agency brands.

Launched in 1998, Priceline differentiated itself from early competitors, such as Expedia and Travelocity, by creating a “Name Your Own Price” system that allowed travelers to bid on airline tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals and vacation packages.

In 2005, Priceline acquired Amsterdam-based Booking.com (then known as Bookings) and in 2018 the name of the parent company changed from The Priceline Group to Booking Holdings. Since then, Booking.com has emerged as the primary online travel agency brand for Booking Holdings – at least as measured by the amount of mentions of each during the company’s quarterly earnings reports, since it does not break down financial results by lines of business. 

But Mercer says Priceline has big plans, starting with the celebration of its 25^th anniversary this year. Mercer’s team is responsible for all aspects of Priceline’s accommodations business unit, which gives travelers access to 1.2 million accommodations in 3,100 cities in 116 countries. 

In an interview with PhocusWire, Mercer discusses plans to grow Priceline’s accommodations business, opportunities in loyalty and its mobile app and why she thinks the industry as a whole needs to “move quicker.” 

The conversation has been edited for brevity. 

What appealed to you about the opportunity at Priceline?

Priceline really offered a healthy blend of both the B2C, sort of direct consumer OTA experience, as well as the B2B profile of affiliates and distribution in a B2B marketplace. And so that profile of consumer demand and a lot of optionality within that demand to bring to the hotel partners drew me in.

It’s an exciting time here. There’s a lot of diversity, there’s a lot of options that we can bring to our hotel partners in terms of the products, the offerings, the suite of portfolio of brands that we represent. So I’m excited to build the team and take it forward.

What are some of your priorities for your first year?

As I'm looking at the first year, I am really looking at how are we going to evolve our go-to market strategy. We want to continue to invest and grow and expand, particularly in North America, particularly in the U.S.

I would say my top three priorities are number one, to make an even greater investment in our relationships with our hotel partners and to make sure that we're providing them the best support possible. 

Second priority is, as we're doing that, we're going to be creating even more value for our mutual customers - or travelers - and that is a huge priority for Priceline as a brand but also for our hotel partners.  We need to be doing that together. And then finally I have a priority around how are we going to continue to grow our direct supply-partner relationships to provide more optionality through the site. 

Who is Priceline's target customer in the accommodation space?

Priceline has always been an iconic brand. It's been a brand that many of us who've been in the U.S. are familiar with, really known to have kind of revolutionized travel, particularly in the deals category.

We're celebrating our 25th birthday right now. We have a ton of really loyal customers that come to Priceline. And what we're trying to do with both our birthday campaign and as we look our customers overall is make sure we're understanding what that means as … historically a deal-centric brand. We found that our customers appreciate value, they travel frequently. And we have a good mix with our product portfolio of customers who are drawing further out, a longer booking window, booking these packages and multi-day stays. But then we [also] have this increase in our last-minute, more deal-centric or mobile-centric demand. … And I think that's a real cue into some of the branding and loyalty that Priceline has. 

Priceline launched its loyalty program, Priceline VIP, in late 2020. Tell us more about how that functions. 

We have both opaque and semi-opaque deals. So we have … something that we refer to as Express Deals, which are completely opaque for our hotel partners in terms of how they want to distribute that inventory. We also have what we call Price Breakers, which are semi-opaque … and then we have a Priceline VIP loyalty program. And each of those gives, from the supplier/hotel partner perspective, an opportunity to provide fenced, closed-user-group rates that can complement their distribution strategy in a way that we know is kind of controlled and more opaque from their distribution strategy. 

How does Priceline’s accommodation offering and strategy differ from Booking.com, which has been growing pretty significantly in the U.S.?

Booking Holdings is really a holding company, and we are completely independent brands underneath there. Priceline is the more deal-centric brand. Both Priceline and Booking.com are the brands that lead in the U.S. in terms of where we are really making a lot of traction for the Booking Holdings brand.

The accommodations team that I lead represents, in addition to Priceline, our B2B businesses as well as the Agoda business. Historically, what the Agoda brand and the Priceline brand have done is joined forces in co-representing the two brands to our supply partners - even though from an end consumer perspective, it’s very different customers, points of sale, products, etc. From a supply-facing perspective, we bring all the supply needs, product offerings, both in the Agoda brand and the Priceline brand together, and we're going to continue to do that for North America. So the Priceline-Agoda global partner services team, which is the team that I oversee, represents both. 

You mentioned Priceline’s B2B business – Priceline Partner Solutions. What is your strategy there?

Our B2B businesses are continuing to grow. It's an exciting area from my perspective. There's a lot of different entities that are interested in and kind of getting into the travel category that aren't traditionally travel entities, and they are looking for partners in that space. We are growing there and continue to see that being a really good complementary demand profile for our suppliers. Typically in the B2B space, we're working with accounts in which it's exclusive or heavily weighted towards only working with one of our brands and that is getting incremental demand that our hotel partners couldn’t have gotten otherwise. We made the acquisition of Getaroom a while back, Priceline made that acquisition, and as we have continued to grow that brand, that brand is very much known for their positioning in the B2B space. 

How do you attract new customers to the Priceline brand? 

Let's talk B2C specifically. Priceline really has a highly-tuned set of tools to acquire our new customers through numerous channels, from brand through performance marketing, that includes our current “Go to Your Happy Price” campaigns out there. We're in social media, and we have other direct consumer communication channels that we're leveraging. We also leverage our flight business to expose new customers to our vast hotel offering. So we do have the option of doing some really great cross-selling within our profile. 

And as mentioned, our B2B businesses, those allow us to tap into new audiences through that B2B arm that wouldn't otherwise be able to be addressed. So that's on that end-customer side.

...we as an industry really need to step up our game to get more tech investment, to get more insightful on our customers and to move quicker in these spaces.

Traci Mercer - Priceline

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On the hotel customer side, bringing in new supply, making new partners, we're making an even greater investment in this area with our local North America-based team that's focused on partnership development and expansion, acquisition and growing our accounts. I can't really give away our secret sauce, but what I can say is we take all those demand components that I mentioned about where we advertise, who we go after, what our customer profile is and map that back to targeting a specific profile of accounts that are curated and prioritized in a way that it helps us to go after the goal of bringing incremental demand to those supply-side customers as soon as we sign them into the family, of being a direct partner with the Priceline-Agoda team. 

What can be done to improve the experience of online shopping and booking for travelers?

Our chief product officer Kevin [Heery] has just shared some really exciting things that we're doing both on our mobile app and our Priceline.com website. I don't think we're able to bring that forward, but I would just say stay tuned in this space because there are lots of exciting things happening. 

We made some pretty major back-end investments in our technology during the pandemic. I think what we saw from Priceline was a real opportunistic play around [the fact] we knew people wanted to travel. Where was the opportunity to travel and how could we align to those customer needs? But also while that was happening, ensure that we got our technology in a place that was more modularized and more scalable for us to take forward. That has enabled us to be able to move a ton quicker and to implement a lot of things both in the B2C, our direct space, but also in the B2B component for our affiliate partners and what they're able to do with our tools. So I would say watch this space. There’s going to be a ton of exciting things happening there.

You’ve been in the industry a long time. As you reflect on your career, what stands out about where the industry is today versus when you started?  

There are a few things that come to the mind. I tend to have a sense of humor, so I'll lead with a little joke. The number one is, I don't know how many people predicted like 20 or 25 years ago that the GDS would be dead, and it's still not dead. I don't know how many people predicted … 10 years ago that NDC was going to completely disrupt the air distribution environment, and we're just getting to the point of NDC actually doing anything. So there is on one hand so many cool and exciting things for us to talk about as an industry and on the flip side, we as an industry really need to step up our game to get more tech investment, to get more insightful on our customers and to move quicker in these spaces. 

I really hope that some of the investments we're starting to see from some of the major brands continue to help us all advance and really transform this industry for what we know customers want. We know they want to travel, we know that travel makes people happy. We know that they're wanting to have a happy [experience] and what frustrates them is the complication around it. And at Priceline we are just working tirelessly to lean into that and solve it.

Finally, what advice do you have for people who are just getting into the travel tech world as a career?

I just wrapped up … a summit with much of our hotel supply team, and some of the advice that we led with there was number one, you’ve picked an awesome industry. We are talking travel and dreams and making memories happen and bringing happiness to customers - and that's phenomenal. You're also helping hotel partners and accommodation partners fulfill what they want to do, which is be hospitable. So lean into this industry. Make a career out of this industry, not just a job. 

But I would then also say be open, be empathetic and be present. There is so much happening in this space. You don't know what everyone's going through. COVID, while we may think that's in our distant past and so far gone, it really impacted some of the people in the industry. Companies went under. Companies are still under incredible debt structuring those challenges. So be empathetic and understanding and then be open and curious, because there's so much more we can do in technology that's leading us forward, but know that we're an ecosystem. And I think that ecosystem impact is something we have to think about as an industry overall.