Priceline To Purchase Rocketmiles For ~$20 Million

According to the WSJ, Priceline has plans to purchase hotel booking website Rocketmiles for approximately $20 million. Rocketmiles is a little different than other hotel booking websites in that you earn airline miles for every booking rather than hotel points or website specific points (ala Orbitz or Expedia).

This buy out sounds a little bit odd to me, Rocketmiles has raised $8.5 million in Venture Capital with the their Series A funding of $6.5 million coming in January of 2014. Assuming that the founders have kept no equity stake (almost impossible) then this is an exit of only 2.35. If we assume that the founders still have a controlling interest then this drops to an exit of only 1.177. Exits that low typically signal a company that is loosing money and loosing money quickly. The other option is that WSJ is misreporting the sales price or the deal also comes with hidden benefits for the Rocketmiles team.

Rocketmiles isn’t the only one in this space, PointsHound (who were acquired last year by Points.com) and Kaligo also run similar sites that offer airline miles for hotel bookings. We recently compared these three websites to see which one came out on top.

If you’re interested in trying Rocketmiles, make sure you double check the prices with multiple other hotel booking websites first. They are also offering two sign up bonuses currently:

• Rocketmiles 5,000 Southwest Points First Booking Bonus
• Earn 3,000 airline miles when you make your first booking with RocketMiles

I promise to stay away from all of this acquisition talk now, sorry for this & the last post as well. Couldn’t help myself.

Hat tip to Trevor from Taggingmiles for letting me know on Twitter