How Ice Bucket Challenge Raise Awareness For ALS?

More than 17 million people participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge to support ALS and other causes. Nationally, 2.5 million people donated $115 million to the ALS Association.

Darren Huston also responds to the ice bucket challenge to rase awareness for ALS. Have a look at the video on CNBC:

Ice Bucket Challenge videos did a great deal of good. Two summers back, the test, intended to raise money for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, took the internet by storm.

Why Darren Huston spent big?

Darren Huston was trying to watch a hockey game; half-listening to a headhunter talk about a company he had never heard of before. But as the headhunter went on, the then 45years old executive in charge of Microsoft’s global consumer and online businesses tuned out the arena noise and began listening to what he thought was an impossible story.

“I said, ‘There’s nothing that big in Europe on the Internet,”’ Darren Huston recalled, laughing.

The 2011 call was from Booking.com, the Amsterdam-based unit of Priceline Group that dominates the European online travel market. By last year, Darren Huston became President and CEO of Priceline Group itself, which has come from dot-com laughingstock to the fifth most-valuable U.S. Internet company—if one still really considers it a U.S. company, because 90 percent of its profits come from overseas, most of them from Booking.com.

Everyone knows Booking and Priceline now. Continue reading

Darren Huston : Priceline tops on hotel bookings

After beating earnings expectations, the Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston, discusses how macro factors like oil and terrorism impact the travel environment.

Priceline tops on hotel bookings from CNBC.

Darren Huston : Mobile a vital driver of growth for the company

Darren Huston

Darren Huston says, "Mobile has been critical to our market share gains in the past year. It’s been driving more of our business direct, through repeats, rather than requiring us to have to buy it. That said, Priceline remains committed to paid acquisition as a technique. We need to keep throwing out the fishing net to acquire more customers, as long as we can do so with a positive return on investment. As mobile receives more direct business we don't have to pay for, we'll adjust our marketing mix to do paid elsewhere."

"Our next move as a company is to address homeowner-managed rather than professionally-managed vacation rentals....There is a lot of interest among our consumers in self-catered products.... We've taken steps here. We've adjusted our business system. We’ve rolled out a simple extranet. We have a lot of things in our pipeline to address the needs for a single-owner model. Delivering single-owner vacation rentals is ultimately where our destination as a company."

Read more @ https://www.phocuswire.com/Priceline-reported-a-solid-2014-on-the-strength-of-mobile-Asia

Booker-in-chief Darren Huston

Darren Huston was trying to watch a hockey game, half-listening to a headhunter talk about a company he had never heard of before. But as the headhunter went on, the then-45-year-old executive in charge of Microsoft’s global consumer and online businesses tuned out the arena noise and began listening to what he thought was an impossible story.

“I said, ’There’s nothing that big in Europe on the Internet,‴⁣ he recalled, laughing.

The 2011 call was from Booking.com, the Amsterdam-based unit of Priceline Group that dominates the European online travel market. By last year, Darren Huston became president and CEO of Priceline Group itself, which has come from dot-com laughingstock to the fifth most-valuable U.S. Internet company—if one still really considers it a U.S. company, because 90 percent of its profits come from overseas, most of them from Booking.com.

Read full story @ https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/31/why-pricelines-booker-in-chief-is-spending-big.html