If Priceline.com Inc.”™s “Negotiator” character famously rode a bus off a cliff during a Super Bowl ad last month, the dot-com was not making any comment on its 2011 results.
The Norwalk-based company added 1,600 employees last year, 250 of them in the United States, giving it about 5,000 total, all but 750 of those workers in other countries.
Priceline.com leases 70,000 square feet of space for its corporate headquarters at 800 Connecticut Ave. in Norwalk.
In 2011, travelers spent $21.7 billion using Priceline.com websites, up from $13.6 billion the year before. In all, the company sold 6.2 million airline tickets last year, while booking 142 million nights in hotel rooms, and nearly 24 million days in rental cars.
With higher fuel prices making some consumers think twice about their travel plans, Priceline.com Inc. booked another big year, doubling profits to nearly $1.1 billion as revenue rose more than 40 percent to approach $4.4 billion.
Despite the hits to consumer confidence precipitated by last summer”™s U.S. debt crisis, the company performed well in the fourth quarter, earning $226 million on $991 million in revenue, up 36 percent from a year earlier.
With London”™s Summer Olympics circled on many travelers”™ calendars, Priceline.com CFO Daniel Finnegan said the company is sufficiently diverse today that no single event can lift its performance; global macroeconomic events, can, however, including fuel prices.
“Certainly, something that takes a big bite out of discretionary spending available for travelers is not a positive factor for our business,” Finnegan said in a late-February conference call. “If fuel prices go higher or stay elevated for a prolonged period of time, that”™s a negative factor, but it hasn”™t had a negative impact to date.”
CEO Jeff Boyd acknowledged the company is shifting its advertising dollars away from its longtime Name Your Own Price engine, popularized by the Negotiator as portrayed by actor Willam Shatner, and into the hotel reservation engines it offers like subsidiary Booking.com, which has its largest office in Amsterdam.
“There”™s no question that the dominant theme in our television advertising in the United States this quarter is around a retail hotel product where you don”™t have to bid,” Boyd said. “That’s certainly not to say that we are de-emphasizing or in any way walking away from the Name Your Own Price business, which continues to be one of our signature products and great value for consumers. But our research with consumers has shown us over the years that there still are a very large number of U.S. consumers that don’t even really know that priceline.com offers a full retail hotel product. And ”¦ we thought it was important to underline that at this point in time.”
Boyd said Priceline.com has been hiring people to evaluate hotels it posts on its website and expects hiring to continue as long as the company increases the rate at which it adds hotels to its engine. Booking.com currently lists 195,000 hotels in 160 countries.
