Expedia ramps up Easy Manage hotel signings

Expedia now has around 6,500 European hotels as part of its Easy Manage agency program – up from 1,500 hotels three months ago. Speaking to Wall Street analysts on Expedia’s Q3 earnings call last week, Expedia chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said that Easy Manage would help Expedia to increase its global supply of hotels, which currently stands…

Expedia now has around 6,500 European hotels as part of its Easy Manage agency program – up from 1,500 hotels three months ago.


Speaking to Wall Street analysts on Expedia’s Q3 earnings call last week, Expedia chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said that Easy Manage would help Expedia to increase its global supply of hotels, which currently stands at around 110,000. This breaks down to around 63,000 merchant hotels and 48,000 agency hotels.


Easy Manage was introduced during Q2 and was specifically launched to help bridge the gap between Expedia and the market leading bedbank in Europe, booking.com, by targeting smaller hotels in secondary destinations.  At the time of the previous earnings call, there were 1,500 properties under the Easy Manage programme.


Expedia said the program would not have an immediate impact on revenues.  “We’re basically building a very scalable lodging machine for the next five to ten years of growth for this company,” Khosrowshahi said.


He added that the real work begins after the hotel has signed up, as this involves: “Loading them on to the site, making sure that content is correct, making sure content is in multiple languages and then starting to push demand out to those hotels.”


In 2008, Expedia signalled its intent to offer an agency model to European hoteliers with the purchase of Italian bedbank venere.com.


The results for the July to September quarter show that globally Expedia booked 21.7m room nights,  a 27% increase on the third quarter of 2008. However, its revenues for the quarter were only 3% up because the average daily rate was 14% down and the revenue per room night down 19%.