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Expedia touting global reach

December 14, 2011 | Online Travel

As the distribution landscape becomes more challenging, one area in which U.S.-based Expedia hopes to provide assistance is promoting and managing hotel and air product in multiple international channels.

Expedia’s goals for 2012 center around attracting global demand through its family of brands, executives said at Expedia Partners Services’ annual conference last week. One-third of Expedia’s air customers are booking flights to North America from another continent, the company’s data shows, and the online travel agency has responded with a ramped-up international plan.

“It’s really about what we’re doing to provide demand for our partners from countries around the world,” said Dhiren Fonseca, co-president of Expedia Partner Services Group.

The move to capture international travelers does not come without some heavy investment. For example, Bellevue, Washington-based Expedia and its family of brands are spending heavily in areas such as mobile marketing and search-engine marketing across several platforms.

“In the U.S. this is still a P.C. business. But in Asia you have a massive, massive mobile base,” said Gary Fritz, co-president of Expedia Partner Services Group. “That mobile base interacts with the Web with different channels very differently.”

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