Expedia News

It's all about scale for Expedia. The company can use its expertise to add vacation rentals to heighten conversion, which in turn enables Expedia to spend more on marketing. That's good for vacation rentals and, in theory, for hotels as well as it should generate increased demand.

Three or four years ago, when Booking.com was trouncing Expedia quarter after quarter, you might have wondered why the Expedia CEO still had a job. Now he and Expedia-Trivago-Hotels.com-Travelocity-Orbitz-Wotif-HomeAway are on a big-time roll -- a rollup that's unprecedented in online travel.

With more than one million paid listings in more than 190 countries, Expedia's pending acquisition of HomeAway is a game-changer in that it saves Expedia years of building up its own vacation rental supply in an increasingly important lodging sector.

An in-depth look at the trends that are driving booking via smartphones and tablets, the challenges holding the market back, and strategies for businesses in the travel and hospitality industries.

Trivago is trying to develop a more partner-friendly booking flow than TripAdvisor has done with Instant Booking. But Trivago, which admittedly is still experimenting with its new features, still has ample consumer confusion to sort out.

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.

The big boys and girls, namely Expedia and TripAdvisor, are at the beginning of the beginning in making the online and mobile booking of tours and activities an everyday thing. Now they just need consumers to join the party.

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.

Nothing helps building a fruitful online travel agency-hotel relationship for Expedia and Marriott than than the latter's wooing another suitor like TripAdvisor. All is fair in love and travel.