Articles tagged “travelocity”

Don't expect the buying binge and consolidation in online travel to slow down any time soon. Expedia, the Priceline Group and TripAdvisor all intend to keep on acquiring puzzle pieces in 2015. HomeAway anyone?

Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, CheapTickets, Hotels.com, Hotwire, and Trivago -- they would all belong to Expedia Inc. if this Expedia-Orbitz deal gets approved by regulators. It's nice to be king -- although Priceline and Booking.com may have something to say about that.

It would be prudent for the established leaders in online travel not to get over-confident. They are going to have to work extremely hard to maintain their positions, which will undoubtedly be altered

The Priceline Group can acquire a restaurant reservations platform in OpenTable and add tons of vacation rentals to its Booking.com unit, but Expedia Inc. plans on sticking with its guns and focusing on the hotel business. Will that focus win out? Expedia certainly has been making strides, but this is still the beginning of the beginning.

After years of struggling, Expedia Inc. is executing well and gaining market share around the world.

The Roaming Gnome himself whispers to us that he is very happy about the Expedia acquisition of Travelocity. It was touch and go under Sabre ownership for such a long time as Sabre, with priorities elsewhere, totally bungled ownership of Travelocity and Lastminute.com.

Expedia is expected to retain the Travelocity brand. It would be foolish not to because the whole value proposition is to tap into the allegiances of Travelocity loyalists. And that leaves Orbitz out in the cold. It is unable to achieve scale and Expedia and the Priceline Group are apparently not interested in scooping Orbitz up.

Orbitz Worldwide is putting itself up for sale, and the leak to Bloomberg may be a signal that the bidding hasn't been particularly robust to date.

Barring complications, it looks like Travelocity will become the newest Expedia Inc. brand fairly soon.

Sabre acquired the once-proud brand, Lastminute.com, for nearly $1.2 billion in 2005 -- and now is selling it for about one-tenth of the initial acquisition cost. Sabre bungled the Lastminute.com acquisition and integration and now it is finally unloading the company after years of trying so Sabre can get rid of a profit drain and focus on its core businesses.