Interview: eDreams Odigeo CEO Touts the Road Back From Post-IPO Nightmare

In January 2015, Dana Dunne became the chief executive of online travel company eDreams Odigeo and began trying to turn the troubled company into a positive direction. Today, critics continue to accuse eDreams Odigeo's portfolio of consumer-facing brands of not innovating and mostly copying others — sometimes literally. Dunne will have none of that, saying instead that, "in Europe, as a whole, we're number one for flight bookings, on average, among online travel companies…. And our innovations in mobile have led us to be number one in mobile sales, putting us ahead of rivals." He says in an interview that travelers make more than 30 percent of its flight bookings via its mobile websites and apps. He also says his team is cutting the cost per booking that it spends on marketing while growing revenue at more than 10 percent a year. Dunne and his team have had their work cut out for them. Three years ago, eDreams Odigeo was floated on the stock market as a public company valued at about $1.5 billion (1.1 billion euro). But the company's stock price sank. Today, its current market capitalization is a quarter of that amount, at about $370 million. That was not how things were supposed to go for the conglomerate, which was a roll-up of five consumer brands: eDreams, Go Voyages, Opodo, Travellink, and Liligo. A few factors dented revenue and profits. Perhaps the biggest was a change in how Google ranks search results, which had the knock-on effect of making eDreams Odigeo brands appear less prominently in searches and hurting sales. Another dark cloud has been litigation against the company by low-cost carrier Ryanair, which alleges eDreams has improperly scraped and presented its airfares and content. The case is ongoing, and eDreams denies wrongdoing. A third challenge for eDreams Odigeo is that its brands tend to focus on selling flights, not unlike U.S.-based CheapOair and UK-headquartered Skyscanner. The problem is that flights have lower commissions and profits than hotels and car rentals, on average. So investors have had a tough time seeing how its flight-focused model can lead to Booking.com-style, double-digit, year-over-year growth — though flights-heavy Skyscanner did recently get acquired by Ctrip for $1.74 billion. Prior to Dunne's appointment as CEO in January 2015, he served as chief commercial officer of EasyJet and chief executive of AOL Europe. Since he got the new job, Dunne has made changes in managem