Dennis Schaal

Even if Uber-Expedia was the right deal — and that was dubious — it was the wrong time.

Was Booking Holdings getting too fat? With operating costs outpacing revenue growth, something had to give. We might not know the exact chess moves for awhile.

Turf wars between individual and professional hosts on Airbnb have been long-standing. Chesky isn't making friends with professional hosts when touting Airbnb's co-hosting network as a way to replace them.

Tripadvisor has well-documented struggles of its own, but its relationship with Greg Maffei's Liberty Tripadvisor has weighed down Tripadvisor for years.

Tripadvisor officials are doing their jobs in that they are trying to grow the company in the event no strategic transaction takes place. But eventually there has to be one.

It's been a tough run for Trivago in the Google Hotels era. No one ever said the metasearch business would be easy.

Booking's revenue has blown past pandemic levels, and it added back nearly 4,000 employees. Expedia trimmed its workforce anew in 2024 following completion of a tech migration.

Expedia was spun out of Microsoft before the turn of the century, and the two Seattle-based companies have always been tight. They just got a bit tighter.

And so it begins.

Uber officials tamped down speculation that it is hungry for a big travel acquisition.