Yahoo Finance Expedia Group (EXPE) Aids Travelers & Partners With New Releases
Expedia Group EXPE recently introduced a slew of new products and features in a bid to boost the travel experiences of its customers.
The company unveiled Romie, the industry's first AI-based travel assistant designed to assist users in planning, shopping, booking and helping them with unexpected changes during trips. It learns about travelers' preferences, serving as a travel agent, concierge and personal assistant.
Expedia Group also leveraged its AI capabilities to unveil new tools for both travelers and destination partners. These include a personalized itinerary builder, self-service booking management, a Fraud Prevention as a Service (FPaaS) solution, AI-powered insights for a better guest experience, and a date-based cancellation policy. These features will be available on Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo globally this summer.
Apart from the AI-powered tools and features, Expedia Group launched Travel Shops, a new storefront that allows creators to share and save travel recommendations in one central place on the app.
The company also unveiled a travel media network, leveraging its first-party traveler intent and purchase data to reach more travelers. The network offers an in-house creative team, industry-leading advertising tools and offsite capabilities, enabling advertising partners to collaborate on campaigns, target high-intent travelers, and tap into Expedia Group's vast B2B network.
Expedia Group is expected to gain solid traction across domestic and foreign travelers on the back of its latest move.
Expedia Group, Inc. Price and Consensus
Expedia Group, Inc. price-consensus-chart | Expedia Group, Inc. Quote
Strengthening Portfolio Aids Growth
Apart from the latest releases, the company partnered with Block’s ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ solution provider, Afterpay, to facilitate an enhanced booking experience for travelers in Australia.
Per the terms, Expedia Group will now be able to offer travelers the flexibility of payments with Afterpay’s 'Pay in 4' product. Australian travelers can also use Expedia Group's Strategic Partnerships and Affiliate technology to explore and book over three million properties globally.
The company also partnered with Philippine Airlines (PAL) to launch PAL Holidays, a comprehensive travel website for travelers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the Philippines, offering easy planning and booking of flights, hotels, transportation and activities.
All the above-mentioned endeavors have added strength to EXPE’s travel booking and trip planning portfolio. This, in turn, is expected to drive its customer momentum across the globe.
Moreover, these launches will aid the company to capitalize on growth opportunities present in the global travel and tourism, as well as online travel booking market space. Per a Statista report, the global travel and tourism market is expected to hit $927.3 billion in 2024 and reach $1.06 trillion by 2028, indicating a CAGR of 3.5% during the forecast period of 2024-2028.
An MMR report indicated the online travel booking market is likely to reach $1.18 trillion by 2030, witnessing a CAGR of 9.7% between 2024 and 2030.
Solidifying prospects in these promising markets are expected to drive EXPE’s overall top-line performance in the near term.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2024 revenues is pegged at $11.86 billion, indicating growth of 22.4% year over year.
However, macroeconomic headwinds and rising geopolitical tensions remain concerns for the company. Its shares have lost 25.9% in the year-to-date period, underperforming the Zacks Computer & Technology sector’s growth of 10.3%.
Intensifying Competition
The latest move is likely to aid this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company to strengthen its competitive position against peers like TripAdvisor TRIP, Airbnb ABNB and Booking Holdings BKNG, which are also making continuous efforts to capitalize on growth opportunities present in the travel and tourism market space.
You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Tripadvisor’s launch of an AI-powered travel itinerary generator for Trips, enabling personalized itineraries based on human insights from over a billion reviews and opinions from over eight million businesses on the platform, remains noteworthy.
Meanwhile, Booking Holdings’ subsidiary, Priceline, added a slew of generative AI-powered features to its Trip Intelligence suite, facilitating the trip planning and booking process for travelers to save time.
It also unveiled several feature upgrades for its generative AI-powered travel assistant, Penny, suggesting customers properties, travel packages and new destinations based on their travel patterns.
Airbnb, on the other hand, introduced a new label feature that ranks the top listed properties with a badge, allowing customers to choose wisely among a wide range of properties. The top property label is based on key metrics like subcategory ratings, review sentiment, host cancellations, and quality-related customer service issues.
The company also launched Guest Favorites, a collection of 2 million most-loved homes based on ratings, reviews and reliability data from over half a billion trips. These homes have excellent ratings, high marks for check-in, cleanliness, listing accuracy, host communication, location and value, with host cancellations and quality-related issues below 1%.
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