Rocketmiles to join Priceline family

According to a Wall Street Journal article, Priceline group is going to buy Rocketmiles, a hotel booking website which allows you to earn frequent flyer miles on various airline partners. Priceline intends to pay about $20 million for the deal which seems to be part of the trend of travel website consolidation happening the industry and widely driven by Priceline and Expedia.

Personally I am a big fan of Rocketmiles given the unique ability of earning miles albeit paying a bit extra compared to other sites but still in some cases it’s worth it given the special promos they keep running such as 5000 miles on your first booking. I hope that Priceline doesn’t downgrade the existing Rocketmiles strategy and build up further on it to get more traction, with all this consolidation happening there is a strong chance that once the dust settles we may see a radical change in terms of pricing points and how much bargaining power they are able to use against the hotel chains to gain more benefits both for themselves and their consumers. All in all I am happy that we may get to see more of Rocketmiles and hopefully better deals in future.