Expedia Group, Inc.
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Expedia Group, Inc.
Compare market positioning with top industry peers
Explore Expedia
Core profile pages, founders and related research hubs for this company.
Company History
Founded 1996 in Seattle, Washington, United States
Expedia was founded in 1996 in Seattle, Washington, United States by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, making it 30 years old.
In 1996, Richard Barton, a young executive at Microsoft, pitched a radical idea to Bill Gates. At the time, consumers had to call a travel agent (who had exclusive access to an arcane computer terminal) to book a flight. Barton realized that if they put that terminal on the internet, consumers could book their own flights. Gates gave him the funding to build it internally. They launched 'Expedia.com'. It immediately transformed the travel industry, fundamentally shifting power away from physical travel agents directly to the consumer's desktop.
Rich Barton is a legendary American technology entrepreneur and the highly influential visionary founder of Expedia. Working as a product manager at Microsoft in 1994, Barton was initially tasked with creating a travel-guide CD-ROM. Recognizing the massive disruptive potential of the burgeoning internet, he aggressively pitched Bill Gates on a radical idea: empowering consumers to book travel directly online, entirely bypassing traditional travel agents. Microsoft launched Expedia in 1996, and under Barton's massive executive leadership as CEO, it completely revolutionized the global travel industry. He successfully orchestrated the company's 1999 IPO and its subsequent multi-billion dollar acquisition. Following Expedia, Barton utilized his exact playbook of democratizing consumer information to famously co-found Zillow and Glassdoor, cementing his status as a legendary consumer tech operator.
Lloyd Frink is a highly prominent American technology executive and the critical co-founder of the massive online travel pioneer Expedia. A Stanford University graduate, Frink joined Microsoft in 1988, quickly rising through the ranks. When Rich Barton pitched the concept of Expedia, Frink became a highly crucial member of the foundational team. Serving in several massive executive roles, including Senior Vice President of Supplier Relations, Frink was absolutely instrumental in navigating incredibly complex negotiations with major airlines, hotel chains, and car rental agencies. His aggressive, highly strategic supplier agreements secured the massive inventory required to make Expedia the dominant global travel platform. Following his departure in 2004, Frink reunited with Barton to co-found the massive real estate tech giant Zillow.
Rich Barton launches Expedia as an ambitious division of Microsoft, pioneering the modern online travel agency.
Microsoft spins off the travel division in a successful IPO, establishing Expedia as an independent tech giant.
Expedia acquires Hotels.com, executing a strategic pivot to dominate the lucrative merchant hotel booking sector.
Expedia Group spun off TripAdvisor in December 2011.
Executing aggressive, market consolidation, Expedia acquires HomeAway (Vrbo) to directly combat Airbnb, alongside legacy rival Orbitz.
Expedia executes the complex unification of its fragmented rewards programs into the single 'One Key' ecosystem.
To dominate the lucrative, high-margin hotel booking sector, Expedia (under the IAC umbrella) executed a strategic $1.1 billion acquisition of Hotels.com, shifting focus away from low-margin airline tickets to profitable merchant hotel inventory.
Facing an unprecedented, existential threat from the rapid rise of Airbnb in the alternative accommodations sector, Expedia executed an aggressive, $3.9 billion blockbuster acquisition of HomeAway to forcefully enter the vacation rental market.
To consolidate North American consumer travel booking traffic and permanently eliminate major direct competitors, Expedia executed aggressive, back-to-back acquisitions of legacy OTA rivals Travelocity (for $280 million) and Orbitz (for $1.6 billion).
Expedia was launched inside Microsoft in October 1996. It was the first online travel service allowing consumers to search comprehensive flight databases, view interactive seat maps, and book airline tickets and hotels directly via the World Wide Web.
Expedia went public on the NASDAQ on November 10, 1999, under the ticker 'EXPE'. Despite the ensuing dot-com crash, Expedia rapidly gained market share as consumers embraced online booking over traditional storefront travel agencies.
Barry Diller's USA Networks / IAC acquired control of Expedia in 2001 and finalized ownership in 2003, before spinning it off alongside Hotels.com and TripAdvisor as an independent public company on August 9, 2005.
In 2019, Expedia completed the relocation of its corporate headquarters from Bellevue, Washington, to a sprawling, state-of-the-art 40-acre campus on Elliott Bay in Seattle, designed to foster collaboration and attract top engineering talent.
During the pandemic, Expedia raised $3.2 billion in emergency capital from Apollo Global Management and Silver Lake, implemented structural operating cost reductions, accelerated cloud migration, and capitalized on surging domestic vacation home demand on Vrbo.
Expedia officially launched the One Key loyalty program in the United States in July 2023, unifying rewards across Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo, allowing travelers to earn and redeem OneKeyCash across flights, hotels, and vacation rentals.
In May 2024, Ariane Gorin took over as Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Peter Kern. Gorin brought extensive B2B enterprise experience, initiating a focused push on international market expansion, partner network scaling, and platform agility.
Over nearly three decades, Expedia evolved from a simple flight search engine into a global travel technology conglomerate operating leading consumer brands, a unified cloud tech stack, and a B2B platform powering travel for financial giants, airlines, and offline agencies worldwide.