Expedia Group announced a new technology platform to provide the underlying online infrastructure for other companies to build their own travel businesses.
Dubbed “Open World,” the new platform “will deliver an entire ecommerce suite, with building blocks like payments, fraud, conversations, and service, that anyone can use to accelerate, enhance, or even enter the travel business,” the Seattle-based online travel giant said in a press release.
Financial terms for partners and Expedia Group weren’t immediately disclosed. The company is expected to give more details today at its annual partner conference in Las Vegas.
Expedia Group, led by CEO Peter Kern, includes brands such as vrbo, Orbitz, Hotwire, Trivago, Hotels.com, and Egencia in addition to the flagship Expedia.com.
The company also announced a new “guest experience score” for hotels that it says “will directly impact the search and sort factors that drive visibility in Expedia Group’s marketplace algorithm.”
The idea is to give hotels incentives to create better guest experiences by rewarding those that do with more bookings. The company wants to build a marketplace that “no longer rewards price above all else,” Kern said in his opening remarks at the company’s EXPLORE 22 conference.
The moves follow a multi-year effort by Expedia Group to simplify and streamline its overall business, including an initiative to bridge its different travel brands with a common technology backend.
Barry Diller, Expedia Group chairman, opened the event Wednesday by recalling the two epic challenges the company has been through: the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks, when Diller’s USA Networks’ deal to buy Expedia from Microsoft was still pending; and the COVID-19 pandemic.
After going through a management shakeup in late 2019 and major job cuts in early 2000, the company opened its big waterfront campus in Seattle “just in time to shut it down,” Diller said. Expedia Group “lost 95% of its business overnight” as a result of the pandemic, Diller told the crowd.
“We sat around and thought, ‘What the f**k?’ ” Diller said.
But coming out of the pandemic, Expedia Group “decided not to let a mighty tragedy go to waste,” he said.
“So while the world was doing jigsaw puzzles and baking bread, we took the time to decide what this company could be, to reassess,” Diller said. “We decided to radically revolutionize the company and come out of this nightmare not just open for business, but to reinvent all of the processes where we served travelers.”
The company’s latest financial results, announced Tuesday, included an 81% increase in quarterly revenues, as travel continued to rebound from the depths of the pandemic. However, its shares plunged amid concerns about the potential impact of the war in Ukraine, inflation, and other challenges.
