Posted by admin on February 28th, 2011
Q: I’m researching tickets from Seattle to London for travel at the beginning of April. I’ve found that the same plane (same time, flight number flown by British Air) leaves under three different airline names with fares from $719 (Iberia which breaks down to $270 plus $449 taxes and fees) to $1,247 (American, $1,050 plus $197 taxes and fees). What’s going on here? I’ve looked at Cheaptickets.com, Expedia and Priceline.
Like its competitors, Expedia makes money by charging a commission (in the form of a booking/processing fee) on every transaction or by purchasing travel inventory (air tickets, hotel stays, etc.) from travel suppliers in bulk at discounted prices and selling them to consumers at a premium. Expedia also offers advertising placement on its websites and earns revenue on a per-click or per-impression basis. We’ve launched coverage on Expedia with a $38.57 price estimate, a significant premium (roughly 45%) to market price. We estimate that hotel bookings constitute 57% of Expedia’s stock value, while air ticket bookings and car rentals & cruises contribute 10% and 6% respectively. what caught our attention in the analysis is the significance of advertising revenues to Expedia’s stock value. We estimate that advertising on Expedia’s TripAdvisor.com website, which gathers and publishes user-generated content such as hotel reviews that travelers use for research prior to making bookings, constitutes over 22% of the company’s stock value. Advertising placements on Expedia.com and Hotels.com generate an incremental 3%. We currently forecast that monthly page views per visitor on Tripadvisor.com will improve slightly in the years ahead, following a significant drop-off between 2009 and 2010 as the economic recession stifled the vacation market. The site should benefit as a growing user database and content expansion drives greater user engagement. However, this metric faces looming pressure from social networking platforms. while TripAdvisor is currently the number one online travel community in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, it implicitly competes with large social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter which also offer a forum for users to discuss travel plans and exchange reviews. Hence, to grow (or even maintain) its substantial advertising revenues, Expedia must sustain its market position in the face of a widespread consumer shift toward one-stop social networks. Drag the trend line in the modifiable chart above to see the impact of various Tripadvisor.com page views per visitor scenarios on Expedia’s stock value. See our full analysis of Expedia’s stock here. like our charts? Embed them in your own posts using the Trefis WordPress Plugin.
