Thomas Cook talks up digital reboot with Expedia

Thomas Cook has spent a long time trying to figure out what to do when it comes to providing online services to customers.

But its latest strategy appears to have given the top brass a spring in their step.

After years of working with bedbanks (some of them it actually owned), Thomas Cook Group went all in with Expedia Inc during the summer when it outlined a fundamental shift in how it will source and sell hotel stock.

Expedia now powers the platform of all hotel-only bookings on the tour operator's website, as well as becoming the preferred supplier of properties for Thomas Cook's deals for city breaks.

The agreement is said to have yielded Thomas Cook with an additional 60,000 properties to offer customers.

It's a far cry from the dying days of the former-CEO Manny Fontenla-Novoa's period at the company, when it had extremely ambitious plans to build an online travel agency of its own to rival Expedia.

In addition, such a deal illustrates how far Expedia and its accommodation rival Booking.com have come in terms of their influence on the traditional players and other OTAs.

For example, Booking.com powers the hotel search and booking platform for Spanish OTA eDreams.

Thomas Cook CEO Peter Fankhauser says the Expedia agreement is allowing the operator to "cut complexity and expand customer choice".

More importantly, perhaps, partnerships such as the one with Expedia and another with Webjet (the Australian OTA contracts "Sun & Beach" properties for Thomas Cook) has ignited what is being billed as a "more comprehensive restructuring of the business than previously envisaged".

But what about some hard numbers? How do these deals help the bottom line?

The Expedia/Webjet packages in the "new operating model" are being forecast to bring about net benefits to the tune of £160 million-£180 million by 2020.

Still, this strategy is not without its own costs - with some £50 million being set aside just to set it up.

In short, handing over much of the leg-work behind the scenes allows it to focus on own brand initiatives in destinations.

Meanwhile, Thomas Cook's online bookings are nearly accounting half of all sales, having jumped from 40% in 2015 to 46% this year.

Web bookings are on a tear in the UK, jumping by 27% during 2017 (Germany is 22%).