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Expedia Group stock rose by more than 8% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the company’s third-quarter earnings report, in which revenue increased 10% to $3.28 billion.
Expedia attributed the increase to growth in HomeAway, Brand Expedia, Expedia Partner Solutions and Hotels.com.
Net income grew 49% to $525 million, and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) grew 29% to $912 million. HomeAway’s operating income and adjusted EBITDA both grew 66%.
Expedia’s gross bookings increased 11% to $24.7 billion.
While Expedia continues to expand in key international markets and grow its alternative accommodation offerings (HomeAway now has nearly 1.8 million online bookable listings, Expedia said), CEO Mark Okerstrom said activities and experiences will continue to be an important part of the company’s growth going forward.
“Activities is absolutely in the frying pan with all of the other fish,” he said in response to an analyst’s question. “We are pretty excited about the opportunity in activities.”
Okerstrom noted that the activities space has recently received a lot of attention and capital in the industry, and it is more competitive today than it has been historically.
“For us, our focus is really about harnessing one of the big advantages that we have, which is we have an incredible installed base of mobile applications,” the CEO said.
He estimated that Expedia Group has some 300 million installed applications on mobile phones. Generally, Expedia can tell where its customers are going and where they are, a good equation for offering activity options via application.
“We will be working on building out our set of activities inventory so that we can deliver the perfect activity to the right customer at the right time,” Okerstrom said, adding that Expedia will work on executing that plan over the next several years.
Source: travelweekly.com