Expedia Group tips

If you are bearish about Airbnb because its room night growth has slowed considerably and rivals such as Booking.com have narrowed the gap, then your downbeat assessment of Airbnb would be wrong.

Travelers are continuing to plan trips further out, as they look toward mid-year getaways.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, November 3. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Expedia Group has been consumed with, and weighed down by, launching a new loyalty program and transitioning its three core brands — Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo — to a common tech platform. But now those tasks are behind it.

Expedia Group laid off around 100 employees in a round of cuts that impacted its product and tech organization, Skift has learned.

Hopper, the fast-growing online travel and fintech company, cut 30% of its full-time staff — around 250 employees — in a bid to get profitable, according to a published report.

Expedia made a major move earlier this summer when it ended its relationship with online travel agency Hopper.

Hopper founder and CEO Fred Lalonde said Expedia Group’s decision to abruptly remove its hotel inventory in July was driven by competition, and claimed it was Expedia that ended up suffering.

In the world of short-term rentals, there are many ways people can book a stay. Offline bookings continue to make up a significant chunk of the market, albeit a declining one, and there are many niche online booking platforms, as highlighted in our Skift Short-Term Rental 250 map.

Expedia Group has completed another round of layoffs. Tript Singh Lamba, a senior vice president of the travel booking giant, sent an internal message about the layoffs last Thursday, which was obtained by GeekWire.

During the week of May 22, North America (NORAM) and Latin America (LATAM) each saw a nearly 10% week-over-week (WoW) increase in searches leading up to Memorial Day weekend in the U.S., indicating that those travelers were booking at the last minute, especially ahead of holiday weekends.

Airlines used to lean on online travel agencies to find customers. But now in something of a turnabout, airlines have enough loyalists that online travel companies are, in some cases, providing services to airlines to help them sell upsells and packages directly.

Expedia will continue to invest in gaining long-term value customers despite the risk of losing bookings to its competitors, as it focuses on brand awareness, paid app downloads and its loyalty program.

Expedia and Booking Rebuild for Post-Pandemic Landscape: New Skift Research: Travel is back in full swing and Expedia Group and Booking Holdings are now fully recovered versus the pandemic. But under the hood, big changes are underway as these two booking sites revamp their strategies for the future.

Expedia Group has announced the first group of tech companies taking part in its new Open World Accelerator program.

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in late November, Skift has been on top of what this new generation of generative AI could bring to various parts of travel.

Travel search volume in the Asia Pacific region rose over 50 percent year over year in the fourth quarter last year, according to Expedia Group. The region’s strong performance led global travel search volume, which rose by 10 percent year over year.

Despite all the hype around what generative AI could mean for the travel industry, the online travel agencies seem to be in agreement — there is potential, but there’s a lot of work to be done first. 

Kayak exited the business of opening hotels and branding them as Kayak hotels, Skift has learned.

That ChatGPT was going to become a platform — a la the iPhone with its App Store — was obvious, it was just a matter of time, what we didn’t know was when and how.

Expedia has released the first version of a travel planning chatbot powered by ChatGPT on its mobile app.