Expedia On Google’s Radar?
Duncan Riley
20 comments »
Michael wrote about rumors of a Google/ Skype hookup April 1, a deal that would make a lot of sense. One that doesn’t are rumors that Google may be getting ready to bid for travel giant Expedia.
Expedia shares were up over 9% Tuesday and a further 1% Wednesday based on the rumors (chart above) for a market cap of $7.18 billion. Expedia stock is still down approx. 30% from its October 2007 peak.
Rick Aristotle Munarriz at Motley Fool makes a lot of sense:
I don’t put a lot of weight behind the pursuit of Expedia. I may have suggested last month that Expedia would look good on the arm of another search engine star, but that is mostly because of the attraction of Expedia’s Web 2.0 properties like TripAdvisor.com….As the paid-search leader, Google relies on travel portals like Priceline, Travelocity, and Orbitz Worldwide, to bid for placement on its travel-related search results. Things could get hairy if Google snaps up Expedia. Sleeping with the enemy is one thing. Paying for its fare and making a rival stronger in the process, is another…
Now that Google has the DoubleClick acquisition out of the way, welcome back to Google takeover silly season. Expect to see lots of left field speculation in the coming months as the market tries to work out where Google will next park some of its bulging cash reserves.
No way.
All GOOG would have to do is buy a small community based travel platform and subsidize the first 100K air fares and BINGO they become the internet leader. BOOYAAA.
p.s. Great photo. I’d be smiling to if I was worth $16 BILLION
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.....135619.asp
Are you guys inventing rumors so that you can linkbait Google? I think you’re deliberately trying to create pages about other companies so you can drive traffic via Google. They aren’t buying a giant travel site — I think we all know this — right before a massive recession. Give me a break!
Google buying old Microsoft assets… I never saw that coming!
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories!
jenkins
Which part of the market rose Tuesday based on the rumors did you miss? We didn’t invent this, we’re simply reporting on it, and yes, it’s stupid, but that didn’t stop the shares heading north did it?
buy boo - it’s off the charts
Naw, they’ll build one on their own… like Kayak
Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity are tied to their extremely proprietary underlying search technologies. I can’t imagine that Google would be interested in picking up an online travel agent with massive legacy search problems. It’s not unreasonable for GOOG to pick up a travel search engine like Kayak (now that they’ve acquired SideStep), since they have a more agnostic view of the travel market; but even they are bound by all sorts of absurdities in the way the travel industry works. And, as noted above, GOOG buying a major player in a sector that spends boatloads in ads might not be the best move.
(Note: I’m a former SideStep Product Manager)
Is it true?
According to the charts for April 1, it looks like Google is bidding for almost every big tech company. Or maybe it’s all rumors. Could they be bidding for JP Morgan Chase as well???
U should post this report on April 1, it sounds like a joke.
Well obviously everyone thinks this is crazy, expedia is legacy technology with a legacy business model. Mark (9) brings up some good points about a travel search engine like Kayak fitting Googles mold a little better, but even then I’d be skeptical that this is a realistic exit for Kayak. In someways you could argue that Kayak, gets ‘paid’ for its search results, because of the way its lead based revenue model works. This is very contrary to Googles general philosophy of providing unbiased results. In that way I dont really think any of the current travel search engines are a fit for google.
The thing the thats getting de-emphasized, is that the Motley Fool article was talking about Googs interest in “Exepedias web 2.0 asset Tripadvisor”. This seems like a semi realistic rumor, particularly considering that Expedia has been considering spinning off Tripadvisor. If Goog could get Tripadvisor without the deadweight of the rest of Expedia, then maybe. Tripadvisor would fit semi-well into Gs strategy of providing a handsoff platform for user generated content, ala Blogger or Knol. And Tripadvisor is definitely growing, but a lot of their money comes directly from Expedia, from related hotel bookings. Tripadvisor in that way has changed a bit over the years, and my perspective is that they would have been a much better GOOG target before they sold the first time.
Ultimately, I think we’ll see a Google Travel play, but I’m not convinced that anybody currently has the right mix of market traction and similar style to get Google interested.
Disclaimer: Im cofounder of Travature.com, a sort of mix of Kayak and Tripadvisor.
-
Michi
http://www.glimpseofnewyork.com
Don’t kid yourself Duncan,
You’re not even ‘reporting’ it; you basically created a post summarizing the Motley Fool article because it was on techmeme. You added zero to the original article in much the same way that you add zero to Techcrunch.
Someone probably made some money off by spreading the rumor.
I just can’t see Google property starting to compete in the search engine results for spots on their own search engine and somehow stay neutral to how the listings are ordered for results relevant to expedia.
If they do buy it, of course, they will make a lot of money with expedia on the short run, but will erode their core business credibility in the medium to long term.
Bottom line: no way is this for real.
Maybe they want to get into the airline business?
I have a feeling Google will acquire one of the following companies.
Admob (Private) - Google secretly let Kevin Scott leave for Admob so he could build a mobile ad platform that could be easily integrated into AdSense/Adwords.
SpotRunner (Private) - They have a presence on the radio and need to expand into television advertisements. That is the only logical acquisition in this space.
Marchex (Nasdaq: MCHX) - Great network of local content websites, and probably one of the most valuable domain portfolios held by a single entity. They would instantly add hundreds of millions in advertising revenue by switching to AdSense.
The graphs speak for themselves…the stock prices are up on the back of these rumours…does seem like a nice way to boost some value before dumping your stock, a bit of a shadowy PR campaign….
Mfrezz — Marchex seems to be failing as a company. Why would Google buy that pile of stuff? Spotrunner’s model is suspect, not gaining the traction that one might expect. Don’t know/hear much about Admob so cannot comment.