Expedia group announced a new technology platform to provide basic online infrastructure for other companies to establish their own tourism business.
The Seattle based online travel giant said in a press release that the new platform, called “open world”, “will provide a complete set of e-commerce suite, including payment, fraud, dialogue and service building blocks, which anyone can use to accelerate, improve and even enter the tourism industry.”.
The financial terms of the partners and Expedia group were not immediately disclosed. The company is expected to provide more details at its annual Partner Conference in Las Vegas today.
Expedia group is led by CEO Peter Kern, including VRBO, Orbitz, hotwire, trivago and hotels. In addition to its flagship Expedia, there are also com and egencia. Common domain name format.
The company also announced a new hotel “guest experience score”, saying that the score “will directly affect the search and ranking factors driving visibility in the Expedia group marketplace algorithm”
The idea is to encourage hotels to create a better guest experience by rewarding hotels that need more reservations. Cohen said in the opening speech of the company’s explore 22 conference that the company hopes to establish a market that “no longer focuses on price”.
Previously, Expedia group has been committed to simplifying and streamlining its overall business for many years, including a plan to connect its different tourism brands with the back-end of general technology.
At the opening ceremony of the event on Wednesday, Barry Diller, chairman of Expedia group, reviewed the two major challenges experienced by the company: the consequences of the terrorist attacks in 2001, when Diller’s US networks was still waiting for a deal to buy Expedia from Microsoft; And the 2019 coronavirus pandemic.
Diller said that after the management restructuring in late 2019 and major layoffs in early 2000, the company opened its large seaside campus in Seattle and “just closed it in time”. Diller told the crowd that Expedia group “lost 95% of its business overnight” due to the epidemic.
“We sat together and thought, ‘what’s this?’,” Diller said.
But after the outbreak, Expedia group “decided not to let a huge tragedy go to waste,” he said.
“So while the world was doing jigsaw puzzles and baking bread, we took time to decide what the company might be and reassess it,” Diller said. “We decided to completely reform the company, get out of this nightmare, not only open to business, but also redesign all our processes for travelers.”
The company’s latest financial results released on Tuesday included an 81% increase in quarterly revenue as the tourism industry continued to rebound from the depth of the pandemic. However, the company’s share price plunged due to concerns about the potential impact of the Ukrainian war, inflation and other challenges.