THE BUSY ACQUIRER
Taking ownership of Orbitz, Travelocity and HomeAway, Expedia’s Khosrowshahi stayed busy in 2015. For corporates, the shifting of Orbitz for Business tech—and clients—to the Egencia platform was critical change. Losing mega-client IBM was the price of integration.
In January 2015, online travel giant Expedia took full ownership of Travelocity from Sabre, culminating a deep marketing arrangement the two reached in 2013. And in December, Expedia completed the $3.9 billion purchase of Airbnb competitor HomeAway. For the corporate travel set, though, the most significant move came in September, when Expedia completed its acquisition of longtime rival Orbitz for $1.6 billion. The deal brought together each operator’s corporate travel arms, Egencia and Orbitz for Business.
Egencia, previously Expedia Corporate Travel, is no stranger to corporate travel acquisitions, having previously folded in Nordic agency Via Travel, Australia’s Travelforce and the French online travel agency whose name it now bears. Every couple of years, Expedia seems to buy another corporate agency. “The only limit in Egencia is our ability to integrate,” Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during November’s Phocuswright conference.
To that end, Khosrowshahi and company have started tying Orbitz’s properties into Expedia, including shifting Orbitz for Business, as well as its clients, onto the Egencia platform. (That has accelerated the departure of Orbitz for Business’ largest booking client, IBM, which now is transitioning to Concur for its preferred booking provider).
As it has with previous corporate travel acquisitions, Egencia is incorporating Orbitz for Business into Egencia’s single global technology stack, which includes platforms for air, hotel, policy, reporting, mobile and others. Talking up that “single vertical stack,” Khosrowshahi views Egencia as “the only true technology company in business travel.”
Already a big corporate player, one ARC recognized as a “mega” agency even before the Orbitz deal, Egencia has ambitions to grow even larger. Egencia is “buying and integrating as fast as we can,” said Khosrowshahi, who predicted that Egencia “is going to be a top-three corporattravel agency in a number of years.”
Digesting Orbitz for Business proves an immediate task on the business travel side, but “in a couple more years, I think you’ll see us buy another player and integrate it in,” Khosrowshahi said.