How Expedia Started
Expedia was actually created by Microsoft in 1996 as an online travel booking portal. By 1999, the company began profiting, and casually Bill Gates made it a seperate entity, and took it public while under the leadership of Rich Barton.
Since then, Expedia’s story is filled with acquisitions. Its timid IPO in 1999 was welcomed with amazing success as it was selling three times more than expected to. And as I said Expedia started to buy just every other travel website. And in 2001, USA Networks Inc, which today is known as IAC, actually aquired the majority of Expedia’s shares from Microsoft.
And IAC is a beast! The amount of companies that IAC owns under their conglamerance is insane! They own just about every relationship matching website you could think of such as: Tinder, match.com, okcupid In addition, they also own just about every single online booking website you can think of, such as: hotels.com, Trip Advisor obviously Expedia and many many more and so a couple of years later in 2005, Expedia was actually combined with many of this travel booking websites to start their own company called the Expedia group.
In 2009, Expedia took a hard blow with the economy crashing and less and less people going on vacations. It's a difficult business models when you're relying on people to go on vacations, because during those times that are taugh and less and less people are going on vacations you're obviously not doing as well. But people are always going to go on vacations. So in 2010 the numbers started to rise again.
In 2011, Expedia spun off Trip Advisor as its own company, and started to acquire even more companies. The group bought Trivago in 2012, And as of today they own 17 other booking websites. Expedia has developed a complete multi-platform experience for their consumers where they can book last minute deals through the app or find exclusive deals in one of their 17 websites.
As of 2019 Expedia is valued at around $22Billion and offers more than 300 vacation packages and is in 70 different countries.
and that's how Expedia got started!