Expedia News

Booking.com wants to change the narrative: Its growth, and especially its girth, compare favorably with Airbnb's on the apartment rental front. And Booking.com can show some digital one-up-manship too because all of its 21 million rooms are instantly confirmable.

With the Priceline Group out of the running to get into the Expedia-HomeAway sweepstakes, it appears very likely that the deal will sail through toward closing.

Wall Street is buying up HomeAway's stock with the thinking that a new bidding war with Expedia could take hold, but that's unlikely. From HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples' comments, it seems likely that some kind of sales process -- and obviously a serious vetting of the deal -- already took place.

For financial, online travel nerds and human resources nerds, here's all the fine print that's seen the light of day so far about then Expedia-HomeAway merger.

If you have a company with multiple product lines and consumer strategies, you want a chairman like Barry Diller to have your back.

It's all about scale for Expedia. The company can use its expertise to add vacation rentals to heighten conversion, which in turn enables Expedia to spend more on marketing. That's good for vacation rentals and, in theory, for hotels as well as it should generate increased demand.

Three or four years ago, when Booking.com was trouncing Expedia quarter after quarter, you might have wondered why the Expedia CEO still had a job. Now he and Expedia-Trivago-Hotels.com-Travelocity-Orbitz-Wotif-HomeAway are on a big-time roll -- a rollup that's unprecedented in online travel.

With more than one million paid listings in more than 190 countries, Expedia's pending acquisition of HomeAway is a game-changer in that it saves Expedia years of building up its own vacation rental supply in an increasingly important lodging sector.

An in-depth look at the trends that are driving booking via smartphones and tablets, the challenges holding the market back, and strategies for businesses in the travel and hospitality industries.

Trivago is trying to develop a more partner-friendly booking flow than TripAdvisor has done with Instant Booking. But Trivago, which admittedly is still experimenting with its new features, still has ample consumer confusion to sort out.