Priceline.com Case

Several internal strengths and drawbacks concerning priceline.com may be inferred from the case study supplied. In an ideal world, the business would have more strengths than disadvantages, enabling it to outsmart rivals who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to match Priceline’s core business plan, which has allowed it to generate tremendous profits over the short- and long-term.

To start, the company has a number of advantages related to its strategy that have continuously helped it succeed in the face of persistent competition. These advantages include; Priceline’s main business model has been patented denying the rest of similar and peer companies access to implementing what priceline.com is trying to do (Fred et.al, 2015). Other than this, for a second strength, the company operates under four different brand names including; through the Booking.com, Priceline.com, Travel Jigsaw, and Agoda brand names, attracting different sets of audiences. Other strengths include the fact that the company has a wide employee base and at the same time allows its customers to make a selection from a wide variety of options depending on what suites them best (Fred et.al, 2015). Lastly, the company is well established, operating in about 160 countries, having access to over 185,000 hotels and accommodations (Fred et.al, 2015)

Weaknesses

Despite these strengths, the company has several weaknesses including the fact that the company highly depends on of third parties such as the hotels and accommodation that it doesn’t own (Goldberg et.al n.d.). Another weakness revolves around the industry in which the company operates in where generally, travel business is prone to fluctuations hence disruption in the whole industry. Lastly, the company only gets to serve US clients seeking to travel to various destinations around the globe but does not consider the population of people from these other countries that may be looking for the same services on the trips to the United States (Goldberg et.al n.d.).

Competitors

Despite the fact that the company dominates the industry in which it operates in, it constantly faces competition from similar companies that are seemingly striving toward offering what priceline.com has to offer to the Travel market. For competitors, the company faces competition from similar companies in the industry including Expedia and Orbitz World Wide. Although priceline.com has been facing this competition for some time, at the time of publication of this case study, the two competitor companies were still no match for priceline.com.

Effectiveness of Strategy

From the above information gathered about pricleine.com and its strategy, I perceive its strategy to be effective and highly efficient as it has greatly influenced the company’s performance where for Instance the company has at a point in time increased the value of earnings per share and hence its overall annual income worth 4 billion US dollars while better still yet much was anticipated in regards to a possible increase in the company’s stock value that is expected to reach $750 per share price.

References

David, F. R., & David F. R. (2015) Strategic Management: A Competitive Advantage Approach, concepts, and cases. 15th edition. Retrieved 08/03/2017

Willie Goldberg, Robert Palmers & Javier Gracia. (n.d) The Priceline group; Client Report. Retrieved 08/03/2017