Expedia's 3 Core Brands, Explained

25.08.2023 - 14:08 / skift.com / Dara Khosrowshahi / Dennis Schaal

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.

That’s one of several interesting takeaways from Expedia Group’s 2022 10-K financial report, which was published Friday.

Expedia Group considers Expedia the full-service travel brand as it offers stays, flights, car rentals, packages, things to do, and cruises.

The company looks at Hotels.com as the singly focused lodging marketer with its hotels, homes, apartments, villas, and hostels.

Vrbo is the whole homes vacation rental brand.

In addition to their main U.S. market, these three brands have localized websites around the world, although most of Expedia Group’s revenue in 2022 came from the U.S. (See more below.)

In the financial filing, Expedia Group stated: “While we maintain a large portfolio of consumer brands, we put the majority of our marketing efforts towards our three core consumer brands: Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo.”

That’s a shift from the company’s 2021 10-K, which cites the Group’s “extensive portfolio of consumer brands.”

The other still-running but now de-emphasized consumer brands include Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif Group, ebookers, CheapTickets, Hotwire.com, and CarRentals.com.

In 2018, Skift did an explainer on Expedia Group’s then far-flung 23 brands, including consumer and business-to-business brands. The company has shed several of those brands since Peter Kern became CEO in 2020, namely Egencia, SilverRail, Classic Vacations, Alice, and others.

Under the prior Expedia Group leadership of Dara Khosrowshahi and Mark Okerstrom, many of Expedia Group’s consumer brands had their own marketing teams that sometimes competed against one another, but under Kern the marketing employees now work in unison, or at least that’s the way officials tell it.

The idea is that focusing on the three core consumer brands would reap greater results than a more scattershot approach.

So witness the fact that Vrbo made a return appearance with a Super Bowl spot on Sunday, iSpot.tv estimated that Expedia.com was the third-highest advertising spender on U.S. national TV during the first 11 months of 2022, and Hotels.com kicked off a new ad campaign, Find Your Perfect Somewhere last year, and refreshed it in January.

In video and TV formats, at least, Orbitz and Hotwire haven’t debuted new spots since 2021.

It will be interesting to see how the emphasis on Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo and the playing down of the Orbitz brand will mesh with Expedia Group’s pending launch of a consolidated loyalty program, One Key, which was to combine the Expedia, Hotels.com and Orbitz loyalty programs into one plan, and expand it to Vrbo, as