Travel Booking Site Mergers and Acquisitions in 2015: Expedia's Big Year

TripAdvisor sold its money-losing Chinese site, Kuxun, for $28 million in 2015 and likely used the money to acquire Ze Trip, a personal journal app, and two restaurant reservation platforms, BestTables in Portugal and Brazil, and Dimmi in Australia for a kindred $28 million. Meanwhile, the Priceline Group, which spent nearly $2.6 billion on acquisitions in 2014, spent just $75 million in 2015 on acquisitions for businesses, including hotel-booking site Rocketmiles, revenue management company PriceMatch, and Australia restaurant reservations platform AS Digital. These were among the newly disclosed details that we gleaned from the recent TripAdvisor, Priceline, and Expedia annual 10-K report filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While TripAdvisor's and Priceline's 2015 merger and acquisition activities were modest compared with 2014, Expedia stole the show in 2015, spending $6.05 billion on outright acquisitions and an investment in Latin America site Decolar while selling its 64.2 percent stake in Chinese site eLong for $671 million. Lets's look at the three companies' transactions a little closer. TripAdvisor's 2015 Acquisitions and A Sale BRAND ACQUISITIONS DISPOSITIONS Kuxun $28M Ze Tri