The Expedia Case For and Against Keeping Orbitz and Travelocity

25.08.2023 - 14:15 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal

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.

In contrast, Bernstein research determined that foundational Expedia Group brands Expedia.com and Vrbo are increasing market share, and that “the sub-brands’ losses look to be by design, and have already lost half of their pre-Covid share.”

The backdrop to these developments is that the Bernstein report, “Global OTAs: A deep dive into market share – not all is as it seems,” stated that “For the first time in history — Booking and Expedia have lost aggregate share through Covid.”

But lumping together Booking Holdings and Expedia Group, if ever the hotel lobby’s “duopoly” designation was ever on point, is somewhat arbitrary. The report noted that Booking actually gained a small slice of marketshare since the pandemic began while Expedia Group, and metasearch, lost ground. Google, Airbnb, Hopper eDreams, Trip.com and direct bookings (Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt) were the beneficiaries, the report stated.

One can see from the chart that Booking and Expedia’s combined global hotel market share fell from an estimated 20 percent in the third quarter of 2019 to 19 percent in the third quarter of 2022. But, more significantly, Expedia Group’s share fell 2 percentage points during that period to 4 percent.

The Bernstein report focuses on hotel market share, and factors in their respective short-term rental businesses to derive hotel market share numbers. It found that Booking’s hotel business is four times larger than Expedia’s when considering room nights.

The Bernstein report stated that Expedia Group’s sub-brands — namely Hotwire, Orbitz and eBookers — lost half of their market share during the pandemic, and speculated that it may have been on purpose. Other Expedia Group brands, including Hotels.com and Travelocity, saw a 40 percent traffic decline during the pandemic, the report found.

One has to wonder whether Expedia Group, which has been restructuring to simplify its operations over the past two years, has been laying the groundwork to dispose of some of these non-core brands in some fashion, either by selling them, or integrating their audiences into Expedia.com and Vrbo.

After all, over the last couple of years, Expedia Group, in the name of streamlining operations, sold or disposed of brands, including Egencia, Classic Vacations, SilverRail, Alice, Expedia Group Mulitfamily, and BodyBuilding.com. Expedia scaled back other brands like Local Expert, trimmed its global distribution suppliers, and combined teams companywide to overturn the previous brand by brand operational