Expedia News

In aggregate the reviews are mostly positive, but combing through individual reviews points to two companies where employees are concerned about advancement opportunities or work/life balance in the shadows of whatever great perks are offered. Winning over the consumer rarely happens unless a company wins over its employees as well.

It's another chapter in the convergence of everything: Expedia, the online travel agency, invested in the Alice guest-experience app as Expedia tries to get deeper into providing technology services for hotels. Everyone's doing it -- or will soon.

The websites that have the most comprehensive set of lodging choices, whether they are hotels, vacation rentals, apartments or igloos, will dominate. Expedia, through its HomeAway acquisition and intent to develop apartment rentals in cities, knows this and is getting ready for the future of travel in lodging.

In the consolidation game, Expedia's business model is to do heavy integration of the acquired companies' back-end platforms while retaining their brands and axing lots of employees to trim costs and boost the bottom line. Synergies for some, unemployment for others.

Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston touts his company's organic growth versus Expedia Inc.'s strategy of mostly acquiring companies that need to be put back on track. Rest assured, however, that Priceline would plunk down a few billion dollars on the right acquisition target. It just wasn't HomeAway, and TripAdvisor and Airbnb are too expensive.

While the big chains have tech and marketing people to optimize websites and their cost-per click campaigns, booking sites in transformation such as Booking.com, Trivago and TripAdvisor are squarely directed at making themselves more essential to smaller, independent hotels. It is another sign of the changing role of metasearch sites and online travel agencies in the mobile era.

The latest revenue numbers from Airbnb explain why Expedia is acquiring HomeAway, the Priceline Group is touting its 21 million bookable rooms, and Wall Street analysts are questioning hotel-chain CEOs on the prospect of selling hotel rooms through Airbnb.

HomeAway, as it becomes part of Expedia Inc., will become more urban-oriented, and Airbnb is determined to onboard vacation rentals in resort locations. All of which means that Expedia, Airbnb, and Booking.com will increasingly butt heads over the next few years.

TripAdvisor wanted to keep the details secret. But the price for finally getting the Priceline Group/Booking.com into TripAdvisor Instant Booking was playing the online travel agency exclusivity card. Expedia is shut out for now and can join later. Will Book on Google play a similar game?

As this TripAdvisor-Priceline Group partnership takes off, observe it closely because it signals a new stage in earnest in travel bookings -- the real emergence of third-party sites such as TripAdvisor and perhaps Google at some juncture that were primarily media sites as real forces in travel transactions.