In a travel market alternatively smudged by the Iceland volcano and boosted by the FIFA World Cup in South Africa in the second quarter, Priceline.com Inc. increased revenue 27 percent from a year ago to $768 million and realized $115 million in profits.
The Norwalk-based company”™s results included bookings generated by TravelJigsaw, an international car-hire service Priceline acquired in May.
Gross travel bookings domestically were up 20 percent thanks to strong growth in hotel reservations, but growth in airfares and domestic car rentals was more modest, though the industries are once again adding flights and vehicles.
“The air and rental-car businesses are impacted by supply,” said Jeff Boyd, CEO of Priceline, in a conference call with investment analysts in early August. “We are starting to see enough of an improvement in the broad markets for airline tickets and for rental cars that ”¦ capacity reductions year-over-year are weighing in fairly dramatically; and in some cases, rental car companies are adding fleet for peak demand period. So, I think that the improving conditions in the economy certainly could mitigate the capacity issues that we”™ve been dealing with to a significant degree over the last couple of years.”
Business tripled on Priceline”™s Agoda.com Asian hotel websites in the second quarter, despite the impact of political upheaval and violence in Thailand this year.
“It certainly remains to be seen whether high-season travel in Thailand ”“ which is a very important destination ”“ will come back to the levels that we would expect to see,” Boyd said. “We just won”™t know until we get there. Having said that ”¦ we”™re pretty impressed by the growth in the Asian business in general, given the weak demand in Thailand.”
