Travelers booking flights and hotels from Expedia in a co-branded feature in the Afterpay app can now choose to pay in four interest-free payments over six weeks, Expedia announced.
25.08.2023 - 13:10 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal / Uber
When it comes to online travel agencies’ business to business deals, you may need a scorecard to keep up. In the latest deal, Expedia Group became the power behind Walmart’s travel offering.
The companies announced Tuesday afternoon that Expedia Group would be providing properties (900,000), airlines (500+), car rental companies (100+), and activities (“thousands”) to Walmart + Travel.
When Walmart members book travel on that Expedia-powered travel site, they are eligible to receive 5% Walmart cash back on hotels, vacation rentals, car rentals and activities, 2% on flights, and “a blended rate” of Walmart cash on vacation packages, the companies stated. That means for a flight-hotel package, the travelers would receive 5% Walmart cash back on the hotel and 2% on the flight.
The Walmart win for Expedia Group’s business to business arm, which generated 25% of the company’s total revenue in the first quarter, follows Expedia bowing out of a broadly similar partnership with Hopper two weeks ago.
In another development, Hopper won a partnership with Uber in May to provide it with flight inventory and its fintech products, including various price freeze features.
That had to be a disappointment for Expedia since Uber’s current CEO is on the Expedia board and was a longtime Expedia Group CEO.
However, Expedia has said in the past that it walked away from a potential Uber deal because the economics didn’t make sense.
Walmart, a major retailer that did $611 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023, has gone through numerous iterations of its travel offerings over the past couple of decades. Going all the way back to 2004, for example, Walmart Vacations offered cruises from National Leisure Group. Walmart’s sister brand, Sam’s Club, has a travel offering that has been powered by several providers over the years.
Expedia handles much of the customer service for Walmart + Travel, whether through its live agents or its AI-backed virtual agent.
Travelers booking flights and hotels from Expedia in a co-branded feature in the Afterpay app can now choose to pay in four interest-free payments over six weeks, Expedia announced.
To hear Expedia Group officials tell it, 2023 is shaping up as a year when lots — but not all — of the tough, behind-the-scenes tech work will have been completed, and the company will start to reap the benefits.
Rumors have surfaced on social media that Expedia Group would announce this Thursday during its fourth quarter earnings call that customers would no longer be able to book vacation rentals on Expedia.com — but that’s not going to happen because it would be self-sabotage.
Expedia Group has 10 consumer brands, but its marketing strategy shifted starting in late 2021 to emphasize three core brands above all others: Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo.
Five years ago, Airbnb toyed with the idea of launching a a “superguest” loyalty program, but CEO Brian Chesky seemed to shoot down the notion of a rewards program a couple of weeks ago.
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Expedia Group and Mastercard are teaming to power a loyalty points redemption program that enables banks and credit unions that issue Mastercards to enable their cardholders to redeem credit card loyalty points after booking Expedia-provided trips.
Expedia Group officials hope that its Hotels.com brand, which migrated its technology to the Expedia platform last year and saw 20 percent growth in gross bookings in the first quarter of 2023, is a model for good things to come for its Vrbo vacation rental brand this year and beyond.
Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern, who’s been working on revamping the company since April 2020, said “it would’ve been impossible for the old us, three years ago,” to have been nimble enough to be among the first movers in generative AI among online travel companies.
Expedia Group told Google that the bait and switch tactics that some online travel agencies deploy in Google’s price comparison feature, Google Hotels, is “screwed up” and Google made some satisfactory changes.