Articles tagged “priceline”

Hotels like that online travel agencies sell their rooms, but they'd much rather sell the rooms themselves -- especially as consolidation has given giants like Expedia more power over negotiating prices.

Expedia's purchase of HomeAway sets the stage for big moves in the online booking sector.

Booking.com is telegraphing the fact that it is open to participate in Book on Google now that it agreed to participate in Book on TripAdvisor.

Booking.com wants to change the narrative: Its growth, and especially its girth, compare favorably with Airbnb's on the apartment rental front. And Booking.com can show some digital one-up-manship too because all of its 21 million rooms are instantly confirmable.

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.

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.

Search engine optimization had a great run but we are way past it now. Instead the top dogs in digital marketing are Google itself and the largest and most skilled players that can pay for those clicks and convert the hell out of them.

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?