Online travel services group Expedia has reported its results for Q2 2009, and the financials aren’t looking spectacular, but they are not as bad as expected.
Although the number of booking transactions handled by the company actually saw a small uptick, gross bookings decreased 5%. As a result, revenues went down 3% (from $795 million in 2008 to $770 million) and operating income decreased a staggering 33%.
On the upside, Expedia’s flight and hotel bookings rose 10% in the second quarter compared to the first quarter following some expense-cutting measures and airline fare cuts. The company’s second-quarter profit was $41 million, or 14 cents per share.
And while earnings fell 57%, Expedia’s results beat Wall Street expectations, sending shares up 13% at $20.73 in recent trading on Nasdaq. The stock has more than doubled this year, up about 37% in the past month.
Expedia, next to online travel agency Expedia.com, owns a number of properties in the field, including Hotels.com, TripAdvisor and Hotwire.
Not bad of a performance during the recession…
It might be worthwhile to mention that earnings after special charges and options related expenses were 38 cents per share when compared to 33 cents last year and analyst expectations of 31 cents excluding charges.
These earnings are even more impressive when you consider that businesses are cutting back on G&A expenses and consumers are also scaling back on travel.
Expedia is one of those companies I want to like, but honestly I just can’t find the deals there that I can find elsewhere.
Agreed, recently planned a holiday and used Trip Advisor to recommend places then Asia Rooms, Wotif.com etc.. to actually book em.
Still, they seem to be doing ok without me.
ahh, but they are enjoying your patronage since they also own TripAdvisor. if you used TA to find AsiaRooms or Wotif, then TA got paid a click price and Expedia (the parent) made some $s. Their breadth is a real strength of theirs.
Looks like this will keep the Expedia Shareholders happy.
How are they still in business. They have been scamming people. SOurce: http://www.expedianews.com
Airlines have to move out of the GDS based model soon enough for survival… Of course that’s my take on the situation.
cheers,
Marvin
http://yousuggest.us
Perhaps “non-spectacular” results are not just a side effect of the economic climate. Observing the ongoing trends it seems that the very same concept of Portal as a collection of items that exists elsewhere needs some renewal. Thanks to Google, social networks, Hotel reviews, TripIT, etc. the Internet itself is becoming the portal, no need for an actor that collects and markups offers. Our customers (tour operators) claims Expedia rarely offers the best deal around…