Expedia 2012 Annual Report Download - page 11

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Venere. Our Venere website, www.venere.com, lists hotel properties in hundreds of locations around the
world and provides hotel partners with geographically diverse sources of demand. Venere primarily uses direct
agency-based relationships with hotels around the globe ensuring it can offer customers best-value rates.
Classic Vacations. Classic Vacations offers individually tailored vacations primarily through a national
network of third-party retail travel agents. Classic delivers a full line of premium vacation packages — air,
hotels, car rentals, activities and private transportation — to create customized luxury vacations in Hawaii, the
Caribbean, Mexico, Costa Rica, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tahiti. Travel agents and travelers can
preview our product offering through our websites, www.classicforagents.com and www.classicvacations.com.
Expedia Local Expert. Our Expedia Local Expert network offers face-to-face personalized
recommendations and assistance in booking events, activities, tours, attractions and other services that travelers
seek in their destinations. With access to a rich portfolio of thousands of tours and adventures, ELE operates
concierge and activity desks in more than 100 hotels and other retail locations in many key cities around the
world. ELE also operates www.localexpert.com.
Expedia CruiseShipCenters. Majority-owned by Expedia, CruiseShipCenters is one of North America’s
leading sellers of cruise vacations. CruiseShipCenters has over 160 retail locations, a team of nearly 4,000
professionally-trained cruise consultants and a searchable online database of more than 10,000 cruise vacations.
Growth Strategy
Product Innovation. Each of our leading brands was a pioneer in online travel and has been responsible for
driving key innovations in the space over the past two decades. They each operate a dedicated technology team,
which drives innovations that make researching and shopping for travel increasingly easier and helps customers
find and book the best possible travel options. In the past several years, we made key investments in technology,
including significant development of our technical platforms that makes it possible for us to deliver innovations
at a faster pace. For example, we launched our new Hotels.com global platform in the first quarter of 2010,
enabling us to significantly increase the innovation cycle for that brand. Since then, we have been successful in
improving conversion and driving much faster growth rates for the Hotels.com brand. We are in the midst of a
similar transformation for our Brand Expedia, having rolled out its new hotel platform in the second half of 2011,
followed by the air platform rollout during the first half of 2012, with expectations that the new package platform
will be completed in 2013.
Global Expansion. Our Expedia, Hotels.com, Egencia, EAN, and Hotwire brands operate both domestically
and through international points of sale, including in Europe, Asia Pacific, Canada and Latin America. We own a
majority share of eLong, which is the second largest online travel company in China. We also own Venere, a
European brand, which focuses on marketing hotel rooms in Europe. Egencia, our corporate travel business,
operates in 55 countries around the world and continues to expand, including its 2012 acquisition of VIA Travel.
We also partner in a 50/50 joint venture with AirAsia – a low cost carrier serving the Asia-Pacific region—to
jointly grow an online travel agency business. Although the results for the joint venture are not consolidated in
our financial statements, we consider this business to be a key part of our Asia Pacific strategy. In 2012,
approximately 41% of our worldwide gross bookings and 45% of worldwide revenue were international points of
sale up from 22% for both worldwide gross bookings and revenue in 2005. We have a stated goal of driving more
than half of our revenue through international points of sale.
In expanding our global reach, we leverage significant investments in technology, operations, brand
building, supplier relationships and other initiatives that we have made since the launch of Expedia.com in 1996.
We intend to continue leveraging these investments when launching additional points of sale in new countries,
introducing new website features, adding supplier products and services including new business model offerings,
as well as proprietary and user-generated content for travelers.
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