Booking.com
Booking.com is an online accommodation booking website started as a small start-up in Enschede in 1996, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands and since 2005 owned and operated by United States based Priceline. Its operations centre is located in Bellevue, WA, USA.
Booking.com claims to have over 700,000 properties globally under contract and that it deals with more than 900,000 room nights reservations each day. In 2013, it accounted for more than two thirds of Priceline's revenue. Booking.com is available in more than 41 languages. In 2012, the United Kingdom's Office of Fair Trading found that Booking.com may have been limiting price competition for short term accommodation by including unlawful restrictions in its agency contracts. |
Expedia
Expedia, Inc. is an American-based parent company to several global online travel brands including Expedia.com, Hotels.com,Hotwire.com, trivago, Egencia (formerly Expedia Corporate Travel), Venere.com, Expedia Local Expert, Classic Vacations, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, Travelocity, and Orbitz. Expedia, Inc.’s companies operate more than 100 branded points of sale in more than 60 countries.
History Founded as a division of Microsoft in October 1996, Expedia was spun off in 1999, and was later purchased by TicketMaster in 2001(TicketMaster changed its name to USA Networks in 2001 and then InterActiveCorp in 2003). IAC spun off its travel group of businesses under the Expedia, Inc. name in August 2005, including Expedia, Expedia Corporate Travel (now Egencia),TripAdvisor, Classic Vacations, eLong, Hotels.com, and Hotwire.com. In late 2011, Expedia, Inc. spun out TripAdvisor Media Group, retaining its portfolio of travel transaction brands. On December 21, 2012, Expedia bought a majority stake in travel metasearch engine Trivago in a combined cash and stock deal worth €477 million (approximately $630 million). |
CheapOair
CheapOair is a multinational online travel agency that sells travel services like airfare, hotel rooms, rental cars, and vacation packages. Since its inception in 2005, CheapOair has become one of the top 5 online travel agencies and has won numerous awards, including those from Travel Weekly. CheapOair has received recognition from numerous publications (including Fortune,USA Today, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek) for being a discount option for booking travel services. As of 2014, the website receives over 20 million unique monthly visitors,[7] has agreements with more than 450 airlines, and offers deals on over 100 million airfares.
The agency is headquartered in a Manhattan office in New York City. It also has contact centers in Las Vegas, Nevada; Canada;Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi, India and Pune, Maharashtra. CheapOair employs roughly 2,000 people, 200 of whom areengineers. History In 2005, CheapOair was founded by then and current CEO Sam Jain in New York City as a subsidiary of Fareportal. Since its inception, CheapOair has been the largest unit under the Fareportal umbrella which also includes OneTravel and Travelong (among others). The name "CheapOair" was chosen to elicit a sense of value and affordability.Although the first two years did not yield positive gains, CheapOair has been profitable each year since 2007. In 2008, CheapOair was considered the 9th-largest online travel agency. It also began offering hotel rooms in addition to airfares and car rentals. The agency uses a "complex mathematical algorithm" to identify the cheapest fares for each individual trip. As early as 2009, CheapOair was also using opaque negotiated airfare to achieve discounted prices. By 2010, the agency was garnering attention in the online travel industry. |