Not so very long ago, Priceline.com found itself unceremoniously grouped into the pantheon of dot-bombdom. In 2001, a mere four years after its founding, everything was falling apart at the quirky travel discounter. A foray into name-your-own-price groceries and gasoline had gone expensively awry, burning through cash at a time when Wall Street was in no mood to provide new funding. Alongside the Pets.com sock puppet and day traders forced to move back in with Mom and Dad, Priceline’s wacky television commercials, featuring actor William Shatner of Star Trek fame, became caricatures that defined a moment when even the goofiest idea seemed like a financial juggernaut. The company’s stock collapsed from a split-adjusted high of $974 in April 1999 to less than $7 in October 2002; to get the share price up, management had to seek a reverse 1-for-6 split.
Beam yourself to 2010, however, and Priceline is in clover. The stock has jumped 27 times from its low, to $185; $10,000 invested in Priceline in March 2005 would have been worth more than $101,000 exactly five years later. Shatner’s spots not only are still running, they’re so ubiquitous that he says people recognize him more often as Priceline’s melodramatic pitchman, the “Negotiator,” than as the iconic Captain Kirk. The Norwalk [Conn.]-based outfit is No. 1 on the Bloomberg Businessweek 50 — our list of the 50 best-performing stocks on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. Alongside eBay and Amazon.com, Priceline, now sporting a market valuation of $8.8 billion, is one of the few old-time dot-com darlings thriving into the 2010s.
Few would have predicted Priceline’s success when the September 11 terrorist attacks upended the entire travel industry and threw the company’s very existence into doubt. The unlikely comeback owes largely to Jeffery H. Boyd, a lawyer who joined Priceline as general…