Expedia

“We happened to make a deal with Expedia, my old company, and we're essentially giving the vast majority of the economics of that deal back to Uber One members.”

“So we announced actually now making hotels available on Uber.”

“The ultimate solution is going to be an agent that can sit above it all, and can kind of scour the internet and scour all the booking services and then surface the results, which may be a mix and match of all of them for you based on your tastes.”

“Jack GPT is to this generation what Google was to the last. If you think about Google is like the place where, you know, the front door, you go there, that's your big search. But if you want to, like, look for real estate, you go to Zillow. If you want to unde…”

“Literally all they're doing is they just have someone there who books Through Expedia at an even lower rate on your behalf. And so when you show up to the Four Seasons, they're like, yeah, we have you, but we don't have your information for some reason.”

“TripAdvisor ranks very highly on Google and Expedia ranks very highly. All of this like conglomerate monopoly of travel sites that have been around since our, you know, parents were our age traveling tend to get the most traffic. So what does that do? For trav…”

“And I cannot think of a more fragile business model than the UI layer on top of widely available data. So the problem that Expedia has is the same that Booking and a bunch of these other folks have, which is that the principal heartbeat of the company, flight …”

“Uber has got about a hundred fifty million monthly active users. Expedia has about 45, fifty million customers a year that use the service and pay for stuff.”

“Expedia on an annualized basis is spending about eight billion a year in sales and marketing and about seven hundred twenty million a year In GNA costs. So, and they're running about three billion EBITDA right now.”

“Still to this day, Expedia says, you know, it was their best acquisition, and we led them a great product.”

“And for us, we always came to the conclusion that they're always going to end on their direct brand. Booker.com, Airbnb, Expedia, wherever they have more loyalty points. So for us to create such a strong brand that we will be able to attract customers to us, w…”

“A company I had never known before a few years ago in Saudi Arabia called almost safer, a travel agency. They own, I forget what it is. 80 plus percent of the market over Expedia over the big guys in the U S because they actually learned this stuff and were ab…”

“Something like 18% of revenues on marketing, whereas bookings and Expedia spend 30%, and that's because they have unique inventory.”

“And all these Expedia examples that are plugins at GPT make no sense. They make no economic sense. Those companies should go to zero.”

“If you look over the last 15 years, if I'm an owner of Booking.com, I was only diluted by about five percent. If I was an owner of Salesforce or Expedia, I was diluted by about 25%.”

“And we sold our very first, you know, real revenue client, 20,000 clicks for 10,000 dollars in the month of December, 2001.”

“Expedia was our biggest client at the time. Expedia was owned by IAC.”

“We were moved from IAC into the public company Expedia when that was formed about a year later. And again, we were division within Expedia and to their infinite credit, they let us continue to operate on our own, you know, even though we were selling our leads…”

“A hundred days later, we wire and invest in a company called Trivago. Four years later, we sell it to Expedia for a billion dollars.”

“To me, Expedia was epileptic, seizure-inducing. I mean, it was really terrible. There was so much animation and graphics and so much stuff going on the website.”

“So that's exactly what they're working on now, which is to integrate this product with the leading OTAs. So if you go to an Airbnb or a booking.com or Expedia, you would have that option to book by the R.”

“There was a service on Prodigy that enabled me to access directly the airline and hotel reservation systems. I could spoof being a travel agent.”

“Creating a new word is very ambitious, and very long-term, and very difficult. But if you are successful, you completely own that word in the dictionary, so to speak, and you get to fill it with whatever meaning you can infuse into it. So it takes, it's a lot …”

“We knew that if we started a travel agency, that from an equal access perspective, we ought to be able to plug into these electron, these big mainframe based reservation systems that ran the industry and act like a travel agent. And if we got discriminated aga…”

“We were building for MSN, which we recognized wasn't going to probably succeed as a platform. And so we quietly pivoted to building a web app and we kind of didn't tell anybody. And so we launched, we never launched on MSN, we launched on the broad internet.”

“These are about empowering consumers and then let the chips fall where they may from an industry perspective, right? Building for the future of what consumers want was what we were trying to do, and we were really secondarily thinking about the organization of…”

“Booking.com came in with a different structure to their marketplace and that let them have a far lower take than the incumbents at the time, which let them bring on small hotels. Which couldn't afford the higher take rate of the other marketplaces that were ar…”

“And so we work with partners like Airbnb and booking.com Expedia, all those really popular consumer point of sales. And that all feeds directly into our system.”

“We started with the worst economically driven customer base that you could in academics, but we have every single major university in the world on Qualtrics, and the value came when their students graduated and went to Expedia or went to You know, Heineken and…”

“So if you give us you know, a valid quote up front, like if you've already searched for your trip and you found, you know, a thousand dollars on Expedia, if we can't beat that by our fees, if our fees, 50 dollars, if we can't find you a price for nine 50 or le…”