Expedia Partners With Buy Now Pay Later App Afterpay

Affirm, the buy now, pay later vendor, now has both sides of what used to be called the online travel “duopoly” with its latest partner, Booking.com. The former duopoly, at least according to hotel industry critics, was Expedia Group and Booking Holdings. With the Thursday announcement that Booking.com customers would see Affirm’s buy now, pay later options at checkout when they are purchasing trips, Affirm now counts several Booking Holdings brands as partners, also including Agoda, Priceline and Kayak.

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.

A research report found that Expedia Group has lost global hotel market share since the onset of the pandemic, and all of it has come from plunging business at non-core brands, such as Hotwire, eBookers, Orbitz and Travelocity.

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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In the perennial quest to turn bargaining-hunting travelers with little brand loyalty into customers making bookings and generating revenue through paid advertising, Airbnb widened its already substantial advantage in 2022 over rivals Booking Holdings and Expedia Group.

Expedia Group executives such as CEO Peter Kern and Chairman Barry Diller have long railed against Google’s inordinate dominance in travel advertising, but now Kern is hoping that the emergence of generative AI companies and other emerging technologies may lead to diminished dependence.

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.