Travel Booking Site Mergers and Acquisitions in 2015: Expedia’s Big Year
Skift Take
Priceline's CEO says its "competitive moat is deep and wide." His counterpart at Expedia believes his company needs to get more international. And TripAdvisor's new CFO says it has ample resources for acquisitions. This all should make for an interesting 2016.
TripAdvisor sold its money-losing Chinese site, Kuxun, for $28 million in 2015 and likely used the money to acquire Ze Trip, a personal journal app, and two restaurant reservation platforms, BestTables in Portugal and Brazil, and Dimmi in Australia for a kindred $28 million.
Meanwhile, the Priceline Group, which spent nearly $2.6 billion on acquisitions in 2014, spent just $75 million in 2015 on acquisitions for businesses, including hotel-booking site Rocketmiles, revenue management company PriceMatch, and Australia restaurant reservations platform AS Digital.
These were among the newly disclosed details that we gleaned from the recent TripAdvisor, Priceline, and Expedia annual 10-K report filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While TripAdvisor's and Priceline's 2015 merger and acquisition activities were modest compared with 2014, Expedia stole the show in 2015, spending $6.05 billion on outright acquisitions and an investment in Latin America site Decolar while
