Depending on who you ask, Booking.com is either the finest example of an online travel success story or a giant of the industry that hotels love to hate.
In fact, it's hard to imagine a world when the Priceline Group-owned accommodation service didn't exist, such is its power and influence in so many markets around the world.
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But roll back to the mid-2000s and it was the combination of two acquisitions, UK-based Active Hotels and Dutch company Booking.com, which gave the umbrella company the opportunity to create the enormous - both financially and strategically - entity that it has become.
In 12 years, Booking.com has become the jewel in the crown of the Priceline Group portfolio and is seen by many as a benchmark of how to figure out a market, install a myriad of cutting-edge digital marketing processes, and capitalize on it.
Indeed, without the success of Booking.com, Priceline Group's more recent acquisitions, such as Kayak, OpenTable and Momondo, may never have happened.
In this wide-ranging interview from The Phocuswright Conference 2017, president and CEO Glenn Fogel - the figure credited with both of those deals - explains how, despite the three-figure price tags ($161 million for Active, $133 million for Booking.com), execs didn't anticipate just how important and successful those acquisitions would be.
Executive Interview: Glenn Fogel