IPO-Bound eDreams Odigeo Wants to Be the Booking.com of Flights
Skift Take
If you are sick of hearing about hotels, hotels, hotels, then eDreams Odigeo is refreshing in its contrarian thinking and business assumptions. Can it build a high-growth business out of it all? That is very much an open question.
While Booking.com has become a category leader through its sole focus on hotels, albeit with a smattering of other lodging types thrown in, eDreams Odigeo, which announced plans for an IPO in Spain, plans to make a go of it basically as a pure-play collection of flight-booking sites.
That's right, flights. Huh?
eDreams Odigeo, owned by private equity firms Ardian and Permira and management, is a roll-up of eDreams, Go Voyages, Opodo, Travellink and metasearch site Liligo. Although travelers can book hotels from Booking.com, and vacation packages and car rentals on eDreams Odigeo sites, the group's main business is flights, with particular strength in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK and the Nordics.
While companies diverse as Orbitz Worldwide, Skyscanner and Travelzoo are scurrying to diversify into hotels and are following conventional wisdom that lodging is where all the money is in the travel industry, eDreams Odigeo claims to be the "world's largest online travel company in the flight sector," and is building a business around that monolithic approach.
The company's "revenue margin" (defined as revenue minus supplies) increas
