Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was very excited about the company’s customer loyalty efforts during the company’s third-quarter earnings conference call on Oct. 29.
“Now a fundamental part of our strategy is to continue to develop our marketing and product efforts relating to our proprietary direct channels,” Khosrowshahi said, according to Seeking Alpha. “On loyalty, we continue to see good progress in terms of customer loyalty and repeat behavior. The hotels.com rewards loyalty program, which recently surpassed the 20 million-member milestone, continues to see strong growth and in fact is one of the fastest-growing marketing channels for that brand. Our Expedia Plus rewards program now has over 12 million members and has launched in 27 countries just this year with two more to come by year-end.”
Turning to mobile, Khosrowshahi said that mobile web revolves around new customer acquisition and the app is about cementing those new customers into loyal repeat users.
“We see great traction in both channels, especially on the conversion and product side with our OTA brands seeing a range of 40% to 60% of traffic and 20% to 40% of transactions booked on mobile overall,” he explained. “I think it is safe to say that mobile has transitioned from being a profit headwind to a key component of our core offerings and a channel and product where we see significant potential going forward.”
Expedia closed the Orbitz transaction on Sept. 17. The teams immediately began integration planning, working quickly to determine how best to bring these two leading travel companies together.
“As we’ve said before, Orbitz Worldwide is a global business and, as such, is significantly more complex than our prior integrations,” Khosrowshahi said. “The bulk of the integration work is expected to take place over the next nine months with certain businesses such as Orbitz Partner Network and Orbitz for Business pushing out to a year or more. That said, we’re off to a strong start and the teams are working hard to bring the companies together as quickly and as efficiently as possible, making sure that our travelers and supplier distribution partners are all taken care of in the process.”
Not including Orbitz, Khosrowshahi said the company sees more than 7.5 billion annual air searches, which is likely to increase over time and drive real opportunities to upsell into ancillary air product and fair offerings, as well as cross-sell into hotels, apartments, vacation rentals, rental cars, car hire, local tours and activities, insurance, and more.
“We have just scratched the surface here in an area where we believe we have a substantial lead and a strategic advantage,” he added.