Expedia rolls out new tech platform for Expedia UK hotels

Expedia Inc. is in the process of putting Expedia UK's hotels onto Expedia's new global technology platform and can only hope that the results mimic the gangbuster manner in which Hotels.com has taken to the platform.

Hotels.com, which has been on the technology platform since 2010, saw its gross bookings increase 50% in the second quarter of 2011 compared with the year-earlier period. That's on top of a gross bookings increase of 39% during the first three months of the year.

Asked to describe what the technology platform is, Expedia spokeswoman Katie Deines Fourcin says, "It's essentially a new foundation on which to build new features and functionality. It allows us to innovate, test and learn more quickly and efficiently."

Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, speaking during the company's second quarter earnings call July 28, said the company chose Expedia UK as the first entity among Expedia brands to get the new technology platform because "it's a good mature market. We can work out the kinks in a couple of weeks."

The plan is to introduce the technology platform on Expedia brands across Europe and then to bring it to the U.S., Khosrowshahi said.

Hotels.com has notched its "acceleration" in the U.S. and especially in Europe and Asia-Pacific, Khosrowshahi said, and increased conversions based on the new platform are driving the "core acceleration."

He said the technology platform makes it easy to "drive new feature sets in one area," see what works and what doesn't, and then roll out the features "across the globe."

Khosrowshahi said Expedia.com -- the U.S. site -- is involved currently the subjected of a tech conversion and is not performing up to potential while Hotels.com, Expedia's corporate unit, Egencia, and the TripAdvisor Media Network are leading the pack.

Khosrowshahi said there's no guarantee that placing Expedia sites on the new technology platform will deliver the robust hotel-gross bookings' at a level that Hotels.com has experienced, but he's hopeful there would be a bounce.

In other developments:

Expedia expects to complete the spinoff of TripAdvisor into a public company before the end of 2011.

Khosrowshahi said Expedia.com is still working with its GDS partners and American Airlines to come up with a "connectivity strategy" to tie into the airline's direct-connect offering through GDS aggregation technology. He said the details of the talks are "quite confidential."

Expedia will be monitoring the just-launched Google Hotel Finder, which is fundamentally a metasearch and advertising product, Khosrowshahi said. Expedia participates in Google Hotel Finder and "we welcome innovation," he added. Khosrowshahi said Expedia can buy traffic at attractive rates through metasearch. "That's a channel we play very well in," he said.

During the second quarter, which ended June 30, Expedia introduced flight metasearch to TripAdvisor sites in Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Spain.