Expedia

This article is about the travel website. For the company, see Expedia, Inc..

Expedia.com

URL	expedia.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	booking service
Registration	Yes
Owner	Expedia, Inc.
Created by	Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink
Alexa rank	399 (November 2011[update])[1]

Expedia is an Internet-based travel website based in the US with localised sites for 20 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, UK, US). It books airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruises, vacation packages and various attractions and services via the World Wide Web and telephone travel agents. The site uses multiple global distribution systems like Amadeus or the Sabre reservation systems for flights and for hotels, Worldspan and Pegasystems, along with its own hotel reservation system for contracted, bulk-rate reservations. This last is shared with other Expedia, Inc. sites.^[2]

In December 2010, Expedia removed AMR, parent of American Airlines and American Eagle Airlines, listings from Expedia's site. The decision resulted from a dispute over the degree of access to the site's customers. ^[3] AMR reversed its decision in April 2011, allowing tickets to once again be sold through the aggregate site.

Expedia was started by Microsoft, which they then spun off as a multi-billion dollar company because it was "no longer about software intensive technology" and they were "concerned that they would not do their best at this."^[4]

Expedia is very popular in United States, Italy and United Kingdom and it's less known in other states.

Court Cases

In October 2011, Expedia was fined EUR 367,000 for "misleading marketing practices" by a Paris court. ^[5] Expedia was found to be routinely reporting hotels as "full" and directing the customer to other nearby hotels when rooms were still available.

References

1. ^ "Expedia.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/expedia.com. Retrieved 2011-11-02. 
2. ^ Expedia GDS hotel description
3. ^ http://articles.cnn.com/2011-01-02/travel/american.expedia_1_expedia-travel-agents-american-airlines?_s=PM:TRAVEL
4. ^ Bill Gates on the CNBC TV Show The Big Idea
5. ^ http://travelindustrytoday.com/web/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=12822:mais-non-expedia-fined-in-france-over-misleading-marketing&Itemid=14

External links

• Expedia home page
• Expedia mobile
• Expedia U.K.