Priceline To Buy OpenTable For $2.6 Billion 43
An anonymous reader sends this news from Bloomberg:
Priceline Group Inc. stepped up its acquisition spree by buying OpenTable Inc. in a deal valued at $2.6 billion, adding restaurant bookings to an online travel business already spanning flights, hotels and cars. The all-cash offer of $103 per share for the popular Internet restaurant reservation company is 46 percent higher than OpenTable's closing price yesterday. The deal is expected to be completed in the third quarter, the companies said in a statement today. Priceline is buying a company that seats over 15 million diners per month across more than 31,000 restaurants via online bookings.
Re:What "ass"tounding value (Score:4, Interesting)
You clearly have no clue what OpenTable is and what it solves.
It's a seating and reservation management platform - an essential need for the vast majority of non-casual restaurants. It's implemented as a hardware/software solution that they install on premise, so it works without a network connection.
In urban markets, they are pretty much a de facto standard, despite being expensive and archaic. Their website and mobile apps drive so many reservations that restaurant managers are more than willing to pay the hefty fees. Those consist of an installation fee (hundreds $), monthly maintenance fee (hundreds $), and per-reservation fee ($1 - $10 per PERSON).
As a technologist working in the restaurant industry, I really dislike them because both their consumer and front of house software sucks so much. That said, they're a real business, with real revenue, solving real problems, for real customers. So yeah, go make a "website for hipsters" and wait for your $2.6bn payout, since it's so easy.