Expedia buys $280 million travelocit

Absrtact: According to Benzinga this month, a Oppenheimer analyst noted the Federal Trade Commission's announcement that it might involve an Expedia takeover of Travelocity. The acquisition was confirmed recently, with an amount of USD 280 million. Expedia's early debut as a Microsoft subsidiary

According to Benzinga this month, a Oppenheimer analyst noted the Federal Trade Commission's announcement that it might involve an Expedia takeover of Travelocity. The acquisition was confirmed recently, with an amount of USD 280 million.

Expedia, a Microsoft subsidiary, was one of the world's largest online travel companies and just announced its support for bitcoin payments in the early days. At the same time it is also the domestic book site Art Dragon, Cool news and hotel reviews website to (Expedia's world's largest tourism community TripAdvisor's Chinese official website) of the largest shareholder. The original Expedia and Travelocity collaborative approach is outsourced, and Expedia Travelocity North American operations with all but marketing responsibilities, so many businesses have already converged. The Expedia takeover was meant to help expand its market share in North America with Travelocity's reputation.

Travelocity was established in 1996, is the world's first online real-time ticket booking travel site, is also the first to enter the Asian market OTA company. It had a market share of 35% and 25%,travelocity in 2000, compared to Expedia's 50% per cent. But by 2004, Expedia's market share had risen to 49%, while Travelocity's market share had fallen to 19%. Since then, the gap between the two sides has become increasingly apparent. In 2006, Travelocity was bought by Sabre Corp. at $4.5 billion trillion, and 2009 years later, after several management shocks, it was impossible to keep up with the long-term strategy, which was eventually bought by Expedia at a price less than 10%.

From the scenery unlimited to today, it is because Travelocity strife: Expedia Early start to develop hotel business as a breakthrough, from the hotel suppliers where easy to make a profit, ease the air ticket business profit pressure, and Travelocity at that time has been focused on air ticket business, (a) The difficulty of obtaining profits; the Travelocity website, which relies on the call center to book tickets, is a shock after the rise of the travel media (such as TripAdvisor) and search engine sites such as Kayak, which has been bought by the Priceline Group. In addition, Travelocity a large number of large-scale acquisitions did not achieve the expected gains, but the burden on their own, the acquisition of a good number of sites are now closed.

This acquisition, Expedia is undoubtedly a big winner, not only to eliminate a competitor, but also the travelocity of the expected volume of income in the bag, may make their total reserve beyond the Priceline Group.

Priceline Group was founded in 1998, the core business model for reverse pricing, the largest shareholder is Li Ka-shing's Yangtze River industry and Hutchison Whampoa, accounting for more than 30% shares. Compared to Expedia,priceline's biggest advantage is the price, consumers can open their own quotes on the site, and then wait for the product provider to decide whether to accept the price, and the transaction can not reverse, the price of the hotel products down by half, which is undoubtedly fatal to Expedia.

At the same time, Priceline's investment was downwind, for example, in 2005, the Dutch bookings BV and the UK's active Hotels integration for the Booking.com, for users to provide free worldwide hotel search and booking services, the site is currently Europe's largest hotel reservation site. In South-East Asia, Priceline successfully integrated Agoda's headquarters in Thailand and Singapore.

It is worth mentioning that Expedia in China's partner is the Art Dragon, and Priceline last year again overweight Ctrip, the shareholding increased to 7.9%, in China on the battlefield both early cloth pieces, perhaps there will be a war in the future.

However, even if the acquisition of Travelocity or beyond the Priceline,expedia will not be able to relax. Looking back, Skyscanner also gradually overtook Travelocity and Expedia to become the world's largest independent ticket search engine. The website only provides full price information containing taxes and fees, the scheduled link will automatically jump to the airline or agent website. In the British guardian's "Cheap online ticket Search Experiment" event, the day patrol beat the other ticket booking platform, found the cheapest ticket. More importantly, Skyscanner's full-month parity, annual parity, Destination fuzzy search (only to determine where to search for the global destination ticket prices) and price display contains taxes and other details on the grinding, to help it retain a large number of users.

Booking, Skyscanner such vertical search platform class sites are technology-oriented, do information intelligent aggregation and matching. They have banned the call-center mechanism and switched to pure online trading, giving users a better experience in terms of price and flexibility, such as booking, which can be cancelled free of charge three days before arrival. The internet has changed tourism in the past more than 10 years, but for the former Giants, behind, unable to grasp the opportunity, is also unavoidable to be photographed on the beach.