Interview: How HotelsCombined Builds a Brand Out of an Affiliate Business

Founded in 2005 in Sydney, Australia, metasearch company HotelsCombined built its business through affiliate partnerships but recently has been on a brand-building expedition of its own. While Booking.com, Expedia.com and Trivago may jockey for voice in U.S. TV advertising, HotelsCombined has been busy touting its brand on TV in Korea, Russia, the Middle East, France, the UK, Ireland and Australia, and to a lesser extent last year in Japan and Brazil. Skift spoke with HotelsCombined COO Hichame Assi about the challenges of building a brand from the far reaches of Sydney even as the company, with its affiliate slant, says it offers hotels in more than 120,000 destinations and operates in more than 40 languages, supporting some 120 currencies. The interview was conducted as part of our trends report The State of Travel Metasearch in 2015. Buy the Report An edited version of the interview follows: Skift: It's evident that 2013 was a big year for metasearch because of the Priceline Group's and Expedia Inc.'s acquisitions. What are some of the major things that went on from your perspective in 2014? Hichame Assi: I would say the facilitated booking trend is obviously a key kind of item that started to take more shape across meta. I know Kayak kicked it off a few years ago and they seem to be retracting from it. I’m very sure TripAdvisor is doing it and some of the others are looking at. I think that's probably the most interesting part of it, this convergence between meta and towards becoming online travel agencies, but not fully. I think mobile has really made a difference for the first time. Everybody has been talking about it that this is the year of mobile, this is the year mobile. I think 2014 was definitely one of the years of mobile. I think 2015 will also be a year of mobile where we'll see a massive shift from desktop and traditio