Expedia gets sexier with a home page makeover, and smarter with full responsive design

I am totally digging Expedia's new homepage, although it's been overdue for a makeover.  The new design finally plays to the user's imagination instead of serving a plethora of often half ass travel deals all over the screen.

The sleekness and simplicity of the new Expedia homepage makes way for a more responsive design on a slew of mobile devices, but unfortunately many of Expedia's international sites haven't been touched up quite yet.  The Singapore site is below . . . see how busy the old design used to be?

While Expedia's new design comes a few steps closer to the visual dreaminess and slickness of Airbnb, its multi-product offerings of hotels, flights, packages, cars, cruises, and activities will make it tough to get much more uncluttered.

Update - Check out this tnooz post to see the evolution of Expedia's homepage design since 1996.

Now if only Orbitz will do the world a favor and tidy things up a bit on their homepage.  I mean seriously, how do I even make a search with all the merchandizing attacking me?  Although once you turn on your browser's ad blocker, Orbitz will undoubtedly have more white space than all the rest.

Booking.com takes over hotel bookings on New York tourism website

Powered by Booking.com

The arch nemesis of Expedia is making new friends in the USA, and one of them happens to be none other than New York City.  Booking.com has kicked off an affiliate partnership deal with nycgo.com, the city's official tourism website, to power hotel bookings in New York.

American OTAs must be feeling the sting as the Amsterdam based Booking.com increasingly stomps deeper into American home turf.  Priceline group is already on top of the leader boards in Asia and Europe, according to PhoCusWright.

It appears the NYC site was previously powered by Travelocity, and I suspect that part of the decision to switch to Booking.com was the number of localized sites it has around the world.  Currently Booking.com supports over 40 languages.  This potentially allows NYC to tap into large international markets that are more likely to visit the tourism site compared to domestic travelers already familiar with NYC.

New York is one of the most popular tourism destinations in the United States, and this new partnership may be the tipping point for additional American tourism organizations to partner with Booking.com and appeal to a more international audience.  A quick search also shows San Francisco's tourism site being powered by Booking.com.

From a supply perspective, Booking.com offers 573 properties while Expedia and Orbitz have 508 and 447 properties respectively.

Priceline jumps on the sponsored listings bandwagon and lets hotels advertise on search results

Priceline's new sponsored listings program for hotels looks pretty darn familiar.  Why?  Competitor OTAs like Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity have all featured pretty much the same product on their own search results pages for several years.  Just like display ads, the sponsored listings are also a complementary revenue stream to traditional OTA margins on the materialized bookings.

The sponsored listings are all auction based, pay per click campaigns that shoot hotels all the way up to the highly desired numero uno position in the search results of a particular destination.  In instances when there are pages upon pages of cookie cutter search results, it's easy for hotels buried deep into the dog pile to ascend to the top and gain maximum marketing exposure.  These sponsored hotels will get to sit in the spotlight with more or less free advertising unless someone clicks on their listing.

Since Priceline just launched their sponsored listings program last week, I would advise hotels interested in pay per click advertising to sign up ASAP and target their future lean occupancy dates.  The early adopters will enjoy low cost per click because there will be less competition bidding up the prices in the auction.  But winning isn't everything.  To improve the performance of their campaign, hotels absolutely need to ensure their rates are ultra competitive with the market and their inventory is well stocked to maximize conversion and ultimately the campaign's ROI.



As a consumer you can spot the hotels with sponsored listings because of their faded background color and typically the words "sponsored listing" near the hotel name.  In the example below of Expedia's search results for Bali, the Viceroy Bali is visibly designated as a sponsored listing and commands the #2 ranking after Mantra Nusa Dua (which is part of the Daily Deals merchandizing that trumps even sponsored listings).  Let's face it, getting to #2 in the rankings isn't too shabby when there's a whopping 874 other hotels listed beneath.