From CNET: Expedia has agreed to buy Orbitz for $1.3 billion, bringing together two pioneers of online travel.
The deal, announced Thursday, adds to Expedia's long list of travel sites, including Hotels.com, Hotwire and Trivago. The company also last month just finished its acquisition of Sabre's Travelocity for $280 million and in November bought Australia's Wotif Holdings for about $612 million.
A proliferation of travel and home-sharing sites -- including Hipmunk, Kayak and Airbnb -- has motivated the leaders of online travel to keep gobbling up other players in hopes of maintaining and growing their customer bases. For example, Priceline -- Expedia's much larger rival -- in 2013 bought Kayak, which aggregates ticket information from other websites, for $1.8 billion.
The deal also shows online travel agencies' efforts to reduce their reliance on Google and TripAdvisor for traffic, with the companies buying up meta-search sites like Trivago and Kayak, or moving into more categories, like when Priceline last year agreed to buy restaurant-reservation site OpenTable for $2.6 billion.
View: Article @ Source Site
