“Our focus on securing great inventory for travellers continues”: Expedia

Online travel company Expedia is focusing on improving its customer value proposition and removing barriers to purchase.

“The elimination of the air booking fees and lower hotel service fees contributed to our volume growth in Q2, but really represent initial steps in what is an ongoing process. In fact, since last quarter’s call, we’ve also eliminated many changes and cancel fees, thus providing our travelers flexibility even after booking their trip,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Expedia Inc.’s CEO and president. He shared this during Expedia’s Q2 Earnings Call (transcritp on Seeking Alpha). 

“Our focus on securing great inventory for travellers continues. In June, we launched our biggest summer sale ever with over 5000 participating hotels up substantially from 1800 last year. Participating hoteliers know that the sale will increase their room volumes and as a matter of fact, participating hotels have seen their room nights grow nearly 40 percent during the promotion,” he said. 

Growth in transactions

The 18 percent growth in transactions this quarter was quite broad across products and brands. Worldwide room nights grew 20 percent on an organic basis. Domestic growth was driven by growth of over 25 percent for Hotels.com, 15 percent for Expedia.com and roughly 35 percent for Hotwire.

International room nights grew 37 percent, with the Venere volumes contributing nearly half of that. The company saw impressive growth of 35 percent for Hotels.com in Europe, and APAC room night growth across both Hotels.com and Expedia brands was 80 percent.

In air, the biggest change was the elimination of air booking fees on Expedia.com, which drove overall domestic ticket growth 14 percent. The company sees continued strength in its air ticket volumes, so far in Q3.

New platforms

On new platforms at TripAdvisor, Khosrowshahi said, “Well, I think on the traffic front, Trip is doing extraordinarily well, so traffic in Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions is very, very strong. Obviously, we’re being hurt there on CPCs and foreign exchange.”

“On the meta-front, we are very, very happy with Trip Meta. I think Fly.com announced that they have done, I don’t know, 2.5 million searches. We are in excess of that. We’re not announcing how many searches that we have done, but we are in excess of that. So we think we’re doing pretty well on that front. The team is a great team, and I think we have innovated on Trip Meta, and we’ll continue to innovate on Trip Meta.”

Read more: Expedia