Interview: Expedia's CEO on the Transformation of Travel Booking

Editor’s Note: Skift is publishing a series of interviews with online travel CEOs talking about the Future of Travel Booking, and the evolving habits and device preferences of travel consumers. Check out all the interviews as they come out here. Want to get a glimpse of the future of travel booking? Then talk to Expedia Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, as Skift did, about the massive bet the company is making on push notifications across all devices,  products and brands as the world of "pull" and search, while still vital and strong, may see its role diminished in travel marketing. Under this scenario, Expedia in the background will undertake the ever-more complex task of shopping for travelers while they sit back, and inform them when their air, hotel or car preferences are ready. Khosrowshahi expounded on what he views as the most important trends in travel booking, spoke about the need to be a "street fighter" in China, opined that the Orbitz loyalty program isn't really a loyalty program, and commented about the very serious stakes in TV advertising for travel brands and where the benefits lie. Following is an edited version of Skift's interview with Khosrowshahi on the future of travel booking and related topics: Skift: Expedia, along with Hipmunk, seems to be leading the way in features that accommodate multi-device usage among travel lookers and bookers. You have your Scratchpad product that enables users to start searches on a laptop, pick the search right up on a smartphone, and perhaps finish it up on a tablet. What’s next for Expedia on multi-device usage and where do you think all this is headed? Dara Khosrowshahi: There are a couple of trends we are observing that have caused us to invest in this area. One is in general the process we are seeing for for booking is getting considerably more complex. We see our users now shop across more sites than ever before. A user who's doing a flight search will be doing over 40 flight searches before booking a flight. And we are seeing users shop across multiple devices they book. Where we see today around 40% of our users using multiple devices to book. Second is that in general we see that data in the travel industry is exploding. Data in general on the Internet is exploding. As an example, in 2005 the size of the entire Google index was 200 terabytes. Today Expedia processes over three times that amount in a single day. We process over 600 terabytes per day. People are shoppin