So what would a Google + Expedia Look Like?
I realize I’m a day behind most of my blogging colleagues on commenting on the “Google eyeing Expedia” rumour that resulted in a subsequent rise in Expedia’s share price. For the most part I’m not a big fan of rumours, but it did get me thinking about what such a beast would look like. In November of last year Tim Armstrong from Google presented at the PhoCusWright Conference in Orlando and stated in no uncertain terms that Google has no interest in entering the travel space. So why, less than four months later, would that message have changed so dramatically. Personally I don’t think it has, but since things move so quickly in this space, I guess you can never truly know. In either case, let’s just pretend that Google has bought Expedia and they are now the same company. Since I posted my article titled “The Triumverate of Travel” , the landscape has changed a little bit. So, let’s examine first of all what Google would be get if they bought Expedia Inc.:
1. Expedia.com (including North America, Europe, Asia and Corporate travel) Undoubtedly the largest OTA with immense global reach.
2. Classic Vacations – Expedia’s high end travel group. www.classicvacations.com
3. Hotels.com – The largest hotel website and most prolific hotel co-branded affiliate program in the World. The business unit also includes:
4. Hotwire.com – Not huge, but still a major player in the discount airfare and hotels market.
5. TripAdvisor.com – The largest, most prolific review and travel social network with over 2 million reviews and growing.
6. Elong.com – One of China’s largest “Web Enhanced” travel services company. Online booking is still uncommon in China, so by web enhanced we really mean agent booking with a web front-end. Regardless though, China represents a huge (2 Billion person) market with an ever expanding middle class with cash to burn and a desire to see life outside the confines of the great wall.
So now that we have a pretty good idea of what Google would be getting into if they bought Expedia, let’s take a look at the impact this would have on the online travel space. First of all, Google would probably lose the other two players (Cendant and Sabre) to the other search engines. Why? Because I would assume that since Expedia is now owned by Google that there would be bias in the system towards Expedia over the other major players. This may or may not be the case, but I would suspect that the perception in this case could have a strong effect on advertising budget allocation. The driving force behind these decisions however is whether or not consumers would look elsewhere for travel deals if they suspected that Google was biased towards Expedia and Expedia brands. I would speculate that since consumers really don’t know all that much about where the product is coming from now, that if Google were to purchase Expedia, they probably wouldn’t notice a difference or really care as long as they were finding the products and services they want quickly and at less cost.
One big plus I can see, from a technologist’s point of view, is that Expedia (and other travel companies) could benefit from Google’s search technologies to make search and retrieving of travel product information more intuitive and easier to do perhaps using natural language.
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