Expedia News

Hotels.com, Egencia, Trivago, and HomeAway, among others, are all Expedia companies. The parent company wants Wall Street to understand that it is more than just the Expedia brand. The Priceline Group had long been associated with Priceline.com even though Booking.com is the company's largest brand. So there seemed to be more of a reason for Priceline's name switch than for Expedia's.

Airbnb always gives us plenty to talk about — and this episode of the Skift Podcast features a lively conversation about the many ways the homesharing company is venturing beyond its original focus and disrupting wide swaths of the travel industry.

The battle for online travel dominance began long ago, but now it's really getting serious. Count this as Airbnb's official opening shot toward Booking and Expedia.

Viator leads in online tours and activities, as Skift Research's new analysis shows, but being in first also puts a target on its back. Rivals are working hard to close the gap and the race is far from over.

When we asked then-Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in 2016 whether Airbnb was going to eat his lunch, he responded that he was very well-nourished. But it now appears as though Airbnb has an insatiable appetite. Join us on a Skift Call March 13 to assess the Airbnb threat to hotels and online travel agencies.

Oh, how times have changed. Instead of feeling threatened by Airbnb, some hotels are being wooed by the company. Online travel agencies, on the other hand, are about to get a taste of what it feels like to be disrupted by the likes of Airbnb.

Ryanair says it gets 99 percent of its bookings from its website in a distribution model that has some parallels to how Southwest Airlines does business. Expedia doesn't offer Southwest's flights to consumers, but apparently thinks it can get away with scraping the website of a foreign airline, Ryanair.com.

In which we try to make some sense out of what we know Airbnb is doing now — and what it hopes to be doing over the next 10 years.

A year from now — or perhaps sooner — we wouldn't be at all surprised to hear Expedia executives admit that hotels' direct-booking campaigns were having more of an adverse impact than the company initially articulated. Hotels have taken back some control from Expedia, and its shift toward independent hotels has far-reaching implications.

It seems that Priceline Group's recent pullback from advertising on Expedia-backed Trivago may be a new normal. In a brutal move, Booking.com pulled almost entirely out of Trivago's search listings in Germany and Italy in December.