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Long known for its William Shatner ads and "name your own price" airline tickets, Priceline struggled for market share in the crowded U.S. online-travel market. Under CEO Jeff Boyd, the company's booming new overseas business is now raking in more cash than their domestic operations, while adding a traditional fixed-price air-ticket option has boosted U.S. sales.

On seeking growth overseas:For three years or so, top-line growth at all of the online travel agencies in the U.S. has slowed. The market here has become more mature. But growth in Europe was at an earlier stage, so we decided it was important for us to participate in that growth. We first bought Active Hotels in England, and a year later, we bought Booking.com in the Netherlands. Hotel reservation agents are especially important in Europe because they don't have as many branded hotels. People really need to go online, look at pictures, and understand what amenities are available to know what hotel is right for them.

On moving away from "name your own price":Last year, we unveiled a whole new look and feel to the website that features both retail and "name your own price" options in a very intuitive layout that we call "more ways to save". The critical thing for us was creating something that was easy for a consumer to navigate based on the assumption that they had never been to our website before. For a new customer, "name your own price" can be a bit daunting. So today, a customer comes to the site, tells us where they want to stay, and we show them a list of hotels and prices. Then we say, if you want to save up to 50 percent, you can name your own price and pick your neighbhorhood. It absolutely has made a big difference. If you look at the first quarter of 2007 we had $478 million of domestic gross bookings. Of that, $200 million was new business, sold at retail, which we didn't have three years ago.

On Priceline's next trip: We want to build out our organic growth in Europe. In the domestic business, our focus is to differentiate our brand from Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity by strengthening ourselves as the value player. People can get things at Priceline that they can't get at other sites. If you look at our "name your own price" business, particularly hotels and rental cars, they are growing at rates that are very attractive when compared to the other players in this market. Hotels and rental cars are absolutely driving the profitability of our domestic business, and if we can keep hammering home that brand message that it's a great savings and the trade-offs aren't that big a deal, we'll be successful. We just put a new ad campaign out with William Shatner called "The Negotiator" that really drives that message home.