Updated, 4:12 p.m. | Not content with a commanding presence in online travel booking, Priceline is now taking aim at the world of dinner reservations.
The company agreed on Friday to buy OpenTable, the giant of the restaurant bookings business, for $2.6 billion in cash. With the deal, it is hoping that consolidating the businesses of reserving seats for planes and for restaurants will be a smooth and profitable combination.
It is the biggest deal yet by Priceline, which has turned to acquisitions to bolster its stable of online brands. Last year, the company completed its $1.8 billion takeover of Kayak, the travel comparison site.
The deal was not driven by a slowdown in Priceline’s core businesses, according to the company’s chief executive, Darren R. Huston. Indeed, the company has reported seven straight years of rising profit, earning $1.9 billion last year.
But it had long weighed a potential partnership or acquisition of OpenTable, having met its management team at numerous conferences over the years.
The two companies aren’t quite the same. Priceline serves as an online travel agency, collecting commissions on user reservations through its namesake travel brand as well as Kayak and Booking.com. Over its 16 years, OpenTable has spent time and money integrating its software into restaurants’ systems, essentially managing their inventory of seats and letting them keep track of repeat customers.
That business has grown to encompass more than 15 million diners each month at 31,000 restaurants.
But to Mr. Huston, both companies at their core focus on managing local supply. And both of them have been working on improving their mobile offerings, with OpenTable’s new mobile-payment system looking especially promising. For its part, Priceline could help lift OpenTable’s presence outside the United States.
And as Mr. Huston noted, travelers are diners as well.
“For us it’s a really natural extension,” he said in a telephone interview. “A lot of what we do day to day is very similar.”
(The marriage of travel and dining sites isn’t new. Last month, TripAdvisor announced a deal to buy LaFourchette, a booking service for restaurants in France, Spain and Switzerland, for an undisclosed sum.)
Negotiations took place over the last few months, according to Mr. Huston. Advising OpenTable was Qatalyst Partners, the boutique investment bank founded by the deal maker Frank P. Quattrone.
After the deal closes, which is expected by the end of September, OpenTable will continue to be led by its current management team and will still be based in San Francisco.
Buying OpenTable will be expensive. Priceline is paying $103 a share through a tender offer for the restaurant booking site, a 46 percent premium to Thursday’s closing price. Priceline’s shares fell 3 percent on Friday, to $1,189.30.
Mr. Huston said that the price was fair for what he called “a very premium asset,” one that he said led its field.
That high price inspired hope among some investors and analysts that other local-based listings businesses could also fetch big takeover premiums one day. Shares in Yelp, the user-reviews giant, rose 14 percent on Friday. And shares in the online food-delivery site GrubHub, which went public only two months ago, rose 7 percent.
“At that type of premium, we believe the deal is evidence of increasing demand for local marketplaces like OpenTable that connect merchants and consumers,” analysts at Barclays wrote in a research note, adding that they were optimistic about companies like Yelp and the real estate listings site Zillow.
Mr. Huston cautioned that his company may not be in the market for many more properties, at least for a little while.
“We’re not on an acquisition binge,” he said.
