Expedia

Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) is a multinational travel company headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Originally founded by Microsoft in 1996, the company was spun off as a public company three years later. The company’s main operations include providing technology to facilitate worldwide travel bookings for flights, hotels, alternative accommodation, vacation rentals, and experiences for individuals and businesses through a portfolio of 12 travel technology brands (September 2023). Expedia generated total revenue of USD 11.7 billion in 2022 and, as of December 2022, the group had ~3 million lodging properties, 900,000 hotels and alternative accommodations, 500 airline packages, rental cars, cruises, insurance, activities, and experiences available for booking on its various platforms. 

Expedia offers its services under three main verticals: 1) Lodging, which includes revenues from hotel and alternative accommodation across its brands (~76% of revenue); 2) Air, which includes air ticket sales (~3% of revenue); and 3) Advertising and Media, which includes its hotel metasearch platform trivago and its group advertising service (~7% of revenue). In addition, the company also generates revenue from other complementary services such as car rentals, travel insurance, destination services, and experiences (collectively accounting for ~14% of revenue). Revenues from the US accounted for over 70% of the company’s top line in 2022.

Expedia aims to use its brand strength and technology to expand its market share. It is working toward consolidating the technology and back-end infrastructure of multiple brands to become more efficient while unifying its One Key loyalty program across its multiple brands to drive growth through its B2C channels. The company is also exploring generative AI to improve personalization for users, adding a ChatGPT integration to its mobile app. This builds on a long list of AI features, such as ML-based hotel sorting algorithms or natural language search, which leverage more than two decades of travel and booking data. The company was also among the first to release a travel plugin for ChatGPT, letting users receive personalized travel recommendations based on Expedia’s services using natural language.