Expedia News

The Skift Health Score ranked Booking Holdings as the overall leader in August among 100 public travel companies but the entire travel industry faces grave uncertainties. Then there's that little search engine Google, which has an even larger travel business than Booking.

Airline officials can't just snap their fingers to proclaim they have successfully become way more than an airline. That being said, AirAsia did launch a new vacation package business called Snap. AirAsia's digital business is still very much a work in progress with much to be proven.

The concept makes sense, but there's a risk that metasearch sites could come unstuck coping with all the complexities corporate travel will entail when it eventually restarts.

Jackpot.

Sometimes CEO views of where online travel is headed seem more about the capabilities of their companies than anything else. Will pandemic-induced travel preferences make for dominant trends five or 10 years from now? Highly doubtful.

Despite the deep job cuts, the proprietary Skift Health Score calculates that Booking Holdings has far greater long-term strength than rivals Expedia Group and Trip.com Group. If you follow Booking.com's logic, the future of travel will be substantially smaller than its past.

Vrbo is benefiting from a ton of direct traffic because vacation rentals are having a moment, and competitors' paid marketing through Google fell off a cliff. The brand will likely get some sustainable benefit from the lift, but the dynamic can change in a heartbeat.

Trivago was glad to see that Booking Holdings kept on advertising, however modestly, and upped its bidding in Trivago auctions while many other partners went silent. If Booking is gaining a bit of market share, it is far from seeing a clear path to recovery as travel demand's trajectory remains a crapshoot.

Google's travel ad chief said companies that aren't seeing enough advertising benefits with Google probably shouldn't spend as much as they are. Few big travel companies would drop out of Google knowing it might sabotage their businesses, but probably an increasing number are desperate for alternatives.

Expedia Group, and its Vrbo unit, are willing to take a significant hit to their property listings in San Diego in exchange for an ongoing path to crystal clear legality in an important business and convention market. With other jurisdictions undoubtedly looking on, Airbnb has to decide if it will play hardball.