Expedia News

No one, including the Expedia CEO, knows where some of these converging booking and price-comparison trends will end up. The winners will be people and companies flexible enough to reinvent their businesses every few years.

Expedia is concerned that Booking.com's booking partnership with TripAdvisor will hurt Expedia traffic from TripAdvisor. Expedia's answer for now is Trivago taking hotel bookings. It's not a big answer for now, but it's a start. And Expedia might forge a booking partnership with Google in the future.

The big boys and girls, namely Expedia and TripAdvisor, are at the beginning of the beginning in making the online and mobile booking of tours and activities an everyday thing. Now they just need consumers to join the party.

Booking.com's participation in Book on TripAdvisor is a major win for TripAdvisor, which launched its Instant Booking product a couple of years ago and was slow to get hotels, and especially big online travel agencies to join. The U.S. Justice Department was correct, during the Expedia-Orbitz merger review, to see TripAdvisor Instant Booking as an emerging player to heighten competition.

Nothing helps building a fruitful online travel agency-hotel relationship for Expedia and Marriott than than the latter's wooing another suitor like TripAdvisor. All is fair in love and travel.

Online travel agencies used to be primarily concerned with handling bookings but now Expedia, Trivago, Booking.com and TripAdvisor are all making moves to give hoteliers executable intelligence about the market and other business-to-business services.

Independent hoteliers are indeed exploring alternatives to the big online travel agencies, including finding ways to spur more direct bookings, but sometimes it seems like a steep, uphill battle.

It was a helluva ride but the Expedia-Orbitz deal was never in serious jeopardy because there is plenty of competition despite the Expedia-Travelocity-Orbitz consolidation. But if Expedia gets greedy in the future and uses its new powers unwisely, you can bet that regulators will pounce.

We said all along that increased competition from Booking.com and TripAdvisor's burgeoning power as a hotel-booking site would be enough to get the Expedia-Orbitz deal approved. The Antitrust Division saw Google as an up-and-coming force in flight and hotel bookings, as well.

Expedia intends to improve customers' abilities to compare airfares from airline to airline but it will face a huge challenge in doing so because the airlines themselves will resist those sorts of comparisons.