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According to Forbes, hotels represent 97% of Priceline's revenue with 23% margins. Car rentals and cruises represented 9% margins and airlines at 3% margins.

Assuming Expedia and Orbitz have similar profiles, then this is really a market share fight to capture the largest pool of hotel transactions.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/01/10/bre...

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Yes, the SO works for one of them. The employee discount can go up to 50% for hotels and pretty much nothing on flights.

Does anyone know why there's such a huge disparity in these different types? I'd think the revenue would start getting driven down toward the value added, and I can't imagine the value added by a website varies so much between plane tickets, car rentals, and hotel booking.

Airlines are already operating on such razor-thin margins that it's not surprising that Priceline can't extract much profit from those deals.

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