How The Travel Booking Giants Stack Up and Where They Are Heading

With the announcement that Travelocity will basically become a virtual clone of Expedia in 2014, the lay of the land in the online travel market will be shifting. While Expedia will bolster its leading position among the ranks of the major players in the U.S., it will still play second fiddle to Priceline, including its Booking.com unit, in the global online travel agency pecking order. The Priceline-Expedia gap is especially wide in the all-important, global hotel business, where Booking.com is growing at a much faster pace than Expedia's brands. Priceline's Booking.com currently offers more than 340,000 hotels, apartments, vacation rentals and B&Bs while Expedia's Hotels.com unit provides around 200,000 accommodations. The surprise decision for Travelocity and Expedia to strike a strategic marketing agreement finally ends years of speculation about the fate of one of the weaker online travel agencies, and it would normally portend more consolidation -- if there were anything left worth buying. Consider the following rankings of the major online travel agencies.  We've included TripAdvisor, which is more of an advertising play, but is heading toward transactions: Major Online Travel Agencies Ranked by Q2 2013 Revenue Company Domestic Gross Bookings Total Gross Bookings Total Revenue Market Cap Priceline Group $1.54 Billion $10.11 Billion $1.68 Billion $49.1 Billion Expedia Inc. $5.85 Billion $10.12 Billion $1.2 Billion $7.33 Billion TripAdvisor N/A $32.7 Million * $246.9 Million $11.19 Billion Orbitz Worldwide $2.47 Billion $3.1 Billion $225.8 Million $1.07 B Travelocity N/A N/A $206 Million ** N/A CheapOair N/A $67.7 Million *** N/A N/A * TripAdvisor gets bulk of revenue from advertising, but took in $32.7 million from Business Listings subscriptions and transactions. ** This is admittedly a wild guesstimate, and the real number is likely smaller. Travelocity generated $825.3 million in revenue fo