Expedia News

On hotels' direct-booking rates, one of the major chains is already talking to traditional travel agencies about handing them over. In addition, Choice Hotels, for one, is signaling that better deals from online travel agencies could go a long way toward ending its boycott in distributing loyalty-member rates. If every person has a price, then so indeed do hotel chains.

Global events during the past year have fundamentally shifted how travelers view insurance and how they want to interact with providers during their trips. What was once overlooked by many U.S. travelers is now largely thought of as necessary, and brands want to make policies easier to digest.

It is rare to see a company such as the Priceline Group take an impairment charge so quickly after investing. Even Priceline, in the short-term, at least, can get things wrong. Hotel Urbano needs more cash as the Brazilian economy and political system exhibited further stress, and the Zika virus took hold.

With Expedia reporting a clear tightening in corporate travel spending, one wonders how smaller corporate travel management companies are being affected.

Now-former Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston's decision to emphasize organic growth, his insistence that all properties sold on Booking.com be online bookable and instantly confirmable, and his strategy to keep Booking.com solely focused on the hotel business all set his tenure apart from those of his peers at Expedia. If you can set aside his apparently reckless behavior for a moment, it's a shame Huston won't be around to see his strategy through or to pivot, as required.

To some extent, Expedia is molding HomeAway to its liking. Unlike Booking.com (for now, at least), HomeAway is backing off its goal of making all vacation rentals online bookable. Expedia is also adding apartments in urban areas to better compete against Airbnb and Booking.com.

Expedia is telling hotels that if they "play well" with Expedia it will be very advantageous and the outcomes may not be as positive if hotels decide to rewrite the rules. Many big chains have not appreciated how Expedia has played over the years and they are voting with their proverbial feet.

Google tends to favor digital products over human-facing services but it's possible that a new "travel assistant app" could blend the two. Then again, they've tried this before.

Online travel agencies such as Expedia and the Priceline Group providing business services to hotels is seemingly the new normal. It's easy to understand how this would be valuable to resource-strapped independent hotels but the degree to which major chains sign-on remains to be seen.

We'd rather see PricewaterhouseCoopers or another neutral party estimate the revenue impact of hotel chains' direct-marketing campaigns instead of relying on Expedia, which obviously has vested interests. Still, Expedia's chart furthers discussion and the dialogue under way with hotels, and speaks to how seriously Expedia views the threat and the issue.