Expedia’s New CEO on Vrbo, Loyalty, and International Growth

15.05.2024 - 01:35 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal / Ariane Gorin

Ariane Gorin’s first day as Expedia Group CEO was Monday, and she has moved to the home base in Seattle after living in London and Paris for the past 23 years.

That global perspective, she said, will help as the historically U.S.-focused Expedia Group tries to get more international, including in Scandinavia and Japan. In 2023, the company generated 63% of its revenue from U.S. points of sale.

Skift caught up with Gorin Monday in Las Vegas, where thousands of Expedia Group partners gathered for the company’s annual Explore 24 conference over the next two days.

Here are eight takeaways from the interview:

Gorin: “There are always things to get done. On technology, the front-end migration is done. On acquisitions, I certainly don’t have anything to share right now. What we will do is be really thoughtful about where does it make sense to deploy our capital. I think we have a lot of great opportunities ahead of us organically. The first thing on my radar is about working to accelerate the growth of our company with all the investments we’ve made the last couple of years. It’s in our hands.”

Gorin: “What I can tell you is that we’re taking a measured approach as we do it to make sure that we’ve got the right formula to work in different countries. What’s your marketing mix? What are the product specifications you need for that country? I think in the past, perhaps we’ve gone kind of across the board, and I think here we’re being quite measured and thoughtful about where we want to go.”

Gorin: “I wonder if someone asked Amazon the same question when they started with AWS (Amazon Web Services) to empower other e-commerce players. Travel is a massive $2.3 trillion market. Despite us and other OTAs and large hotel chains, it’s still a quite fragmented market. A lot of people want to be in travel, whether they’re financial institutions who want to add it to a loyalty program, whether it’s long-tail, offline retailers.”

“And so the fact that we can use our technology and our inventory to power them allows us to bring more value to our supply partners and others. It also, I think, creates this nice flywheel of improving the whole ecosystem. And to the question, does it cannibalize? I’m not worried about that.”

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Gorin: “We went through the migration in the second half of last year. Whenever you go through any migration, you’re going to take some steps back before going forward. You have to win back the travelers who are having those experiences.”

“At the same time — because we knew that was going to happen — we pulled back in our marketing spend at a time that when there were some competitors that were becoming more active. We’re very bullish on Vrbo. I think it’s got a great brand, a great positioning, and