How Booking.com turned the other OTAs into converts

With 226,100 hotels in the fold and counting, Booking.com has been experiencing phenomenal growth and kicking butt. How does Booking.com do it?

Officials from parent company Priceline have long acknowledged that retaining Booking.com's motivated and capable management, allowing the brand to operate independently, and offering Booking.com's breadth of hotel supply have contributed to its phenomenal growth and success.

But, what is the secret sauce and how has Booking.com been able to execute so efficiently on its goals?

To understand that, and the global-hotel envy felt in the corporate suites of Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz Worldwide, you have to return to the mid-point of the past decade.

At that juncture, the major U.S.-based online travel agencies were paying an inordinate amount of attention to the merchant model and its buffed-up margins, although they were warring with hotels over issues such as control, brand standards, rate parity and room allocations.

Negotiations between chains and properties, on the one hand, and OTA market managers on the other had become increasingly cumbersome, testy and complex. It had become difficult to police rate parity for the hote