Online travel giant Expedia is poised to move into selling package holidays.
Mass market Expedia looks to packages to keep the customer
Online travel giant Expedia is poised to move into selling package holidays.
Expedia senior vice-president for global market management Cyril Ranque said: “There is a huge opportunity in offering packages to customers.”
Speaking at the World Tourism Forum in Lucerne on Friday, Ranque said: “We do dynamic packages – selling the old way: select a flight, select a hotel, select transfers, activities and you’re set.
“But there is much more potential in filtering the needs of the consumer – by price, length of stay, destination, theme, size of group.
“There is a lot of opportunity to present the right product.”
Ranque told the forum: “Packages are the next big area. We are going to invest a lot of money [in this].”
He added: “To optimise all revenue margins we need to be in all ‘buckets’. But being strong in the main bucket – the mass market – is what is most important.”
Expedia claims to be the world’s biggest online travel agency with a turnover of $4 billion last year on sales worth $34 billion.
Ranque said a company the size of Expedia could not make changes and innovate at the pace of smaller companies.
He said: “Innovation only works in small increments. Start-ups can be disruptive. But we are a mass retailer. We can’t lose the customer. We can’t be disruptive.”
