Booking Holdings

With the Priceline Group out of the running to get into the Expedia-HomeAway sweepstakes, it appears very likely that the deal will sail through toward closing.

TV advertising by online travel agencies has been very much in vogue over the last couple of years. But TripAdvisor decided it doesn't need it for now and instead is going to take its new partnership with Booking.com and run with that instead.

Wall Street is buying up HomeAway's stock with the thinking that a new bidding war with Expedia could take hold, but that's unlikely. From HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples' comments, it seems likely that some kind of sales process -- and obviously a serious vetting of the deal -- already took place.

No one, including the Expedia CEO, knows where some of these converging booking and price-comparison trends will end up. The winners will be people and companies flexible enough to reinvent their businesses every few years.

Expedia is concerned that Booking.com's booking partnership with TripAdvisor will hurt Expedia traffic from TripAdvisor. Expedia's answer for now is Trivago taking hotel bookings. It's not a big answer for now, but it's a start. And Expedia might forge a booking partnership with Google in the future.

One key unanswered question is how this TripAdvisor-Priceline Group Book on TripAdvisor deal will work. Are other big online travel agencies such as Expedia free to join and under what terms?

Booking.com's participation in Book on TripAdvisor is a major win for TripAdvisor, which launched its Instant Booking product a couple of years ago and was slow to get hotels, and especially big online travel agencies to join. The U.S. Justice Department was correct, during the Expedia-Orbitz merger review, to see TripAdvisor Instant Booking as an emerging player to heighten competition.

Booking.com wants to answer the needs of "one customer," the one who books an apartment one day and a five-star hotel the next. Yes, a revolution in lodging is under way and Booking.com is now shouting about it.

Online travel agencies used to be primarily concerned with handling bookings but now Expedia, Trivago, Booking.com and TripAdvisor are all making moves to give hoteliers executable intelligence about the market and other business-to-business services.

Independent hoteliers are indeed exploring alternatives to the big online travel agencies, including finding ways to spur more direct bookings, but sometimes it seems like a steep, uphill battle.