Analysis of Expedia's Global Online Travel Services and Customer Experience Optimization

Expedia is an online travel company. It's global and it encompasses multiple brands like if you've heard of TravelLaw, Expedia itself, HomeAway, Venere, Trivago. There are about 15 or so brands that we encompass. So we offer online travel reservations, anything from hotel to package to cruises. People can go online onto websites or mobile sites and shop around and purchase. Expedia is very dynamic. There's lots going on. There's always things changing. We're acquiring new businesses and growing. So it started at Hotels.com and then brought in Expedia Travel, which offers packages and cruises. And now we have things like HomeAway.

So if it's always changing, we just brought on Orbits recently. So we're always changing and growing and having to learn new things, having to upskill ourselves to keep up with it, learning about new businesses, figuring out new ways to support our customers, like new channels, email, chat. We're looking at best ways to handle social media. So it's that dynamic environment that attracted me. And I was also very lucky because I was familiar with the people who were going to be working with in my department.

So I kind of go back to what I talked about before. It's just the size of Expedia. We have 200 websites globally. 150 mobile websites. We're in so many different countries. And we have all the different brands that I was talking about that offer all different things for folks. So some people like the website for TravelVelocity. Some people are interested in buying an opaque flight, which means that you don't know what the brand is up front. Sorry, what the airline is up front, but you get a better price. That's something you can find on Hotwire. So they have the ability to get different inventory and each site in each company has its own different feel.

Whereas Priceline is one place you go kind of offering one feel and look instead of an inventory. I'd say the biggest thing is the different channels to support customers. So social media is really big right now. And not just being able to respond to someone just said something bad about Expedia. We want to help them out and help see if we can resolve their problem. But being more dynamic and we're really working on what's the best way to reach out to social media and interact with those customers and help them. Have it be a place to resolve their problem. Not just talk about it, but we also have email. We've launched chat over the last few years.

So those are the big ways that we're trying to reach out to other customers. We're also always looking at ways to improve our business so that it's easier for the customer. So they have less work they need to do and have a lot of ease in their travel planning. So they can enjoy the travel part.