Expedia News

While some erroneously looked to Expedia to take tours and activities mainstream, Groupon, if it survives, is making the first move.

Priceline's Booking.com has been conquering the world, often at Expedia's expense, but let's score one for Expedia. Its Expedia Unpublished Rates product has been kicking butt, and stealing share from Priceline's Name Your Own Price since last 2011.

Groupon and Expedia have downgraded their partnership. Whether it was a mutual decision as both parties claim or push came to shove, it was clear that these two big brands weren't going to smoothly co-exist forever.

An outsider might think the U.S. online travel market is already saturated, but Booking.com is proving that there is plenty of room to grow in the U.S., and competitors are feeling the heat.

This current version of the Expedia-HomeAway vacation rental beta functions more like an advertising relationship would than a tightly integrated booking process. These are very early days for the partnership, and what you see undoubtedly won't be the finished product.

Expedia Inc. takes a somewhat narrow definition in claiming to be the "world's largest travel site" in its latest ad campaign, and might get an argument on that score from its offspring, TripAdvisor.

As Expedia CFO Mark Okerstrom said the other day, "scale begets scale." Orbitz's modest 15% growth in room nights in the fourth quarter partially reflects the lack thereof.

Was the Expedia-Travelocity deal just a harbinger of things to come? Expedia thinks so and is looking for additional online travel agency partners who would consider outsourcing the hard stuff to Expedia.

Expedia has been the most aggressive big travel band in corralling travel bloggers, and although their proselytizing can at times be clumsy, it has mostly been very effective.

Want to gauge Expedia's priorities? It implemented its hotel partnership with Travelocity in a hurry in December. But when it comes to rolling out HomeAway's vacation rentals, Expedia says it will get around to deciding how to proceed in the second half of 2014.