Barry Diller on Expedia Buying HomeAway: ‘Smartest Thing Is to Disrupt’

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive of Expedia, Inc., appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning to discuss the $3.9 billion deal that will add HomeAway to Expedia’s already considerably large portfolio of online booking sites.

“This is our largest acquisition,” Diller said. “This was an area we were not in. We were in every other area of travel. We’ve been looking at HomeAway for years now and always thought this was an area we would get into.”

Diller also spoke to Expedia’s growth since its split from TripAdvisor, where Diller was chairman until December 2012. “Over the last four years Expedia has transformed itself. If you look at it when we spun off Tripadvisor, before it was worth about $6 billion market cap. Now it’s about $30 billion.”

Host Andrew Ross Sorkin also asked Diller to respond to Skift News Editor’s assessment of Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s comeback success story.

“We invested massively in technology over the last six, seven years,” Diller explained. “It wasn’t a go-forward strategy of roll-up, let’s do this. It was one step in front of another.”

“The smartest thing we can do is disrupt whatever we can, even if it’s our own business.”