Expedia Looks to Loyalty Rollout and Vrbo Tech Migration as Next Hills to Climb

Expedia Group officials hope that its Hotels.com brand, which migrated its technology to the Expedia platform last year and saw 20 percent growth in gross bookings in the first quarter of 2023, is a model for good things to come for its Vrbo vacation rental brand this year and beyond.

Vrbo's platform migration onto the Expedia tech stack, slated to be completed in 2023, along with the projected U.S. rollout of Expedia Group's new consolidated loyalty program, One Key in July, will help unleash a growth spurt that has been otherwise lagging.

"We've got to get over these big humps and then we start — we've seen it already when we did the Hotels.com conversion, the migration," Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern told financial analysts as part of the company's second quarter earnings announcement Thursday. "We freed up a lot of talent to work on near-term conversion wins, and it's been hugely productive for us. Again, every time we