Tag Archives: Online Travel

Online Travel Updates (Expedia, Booking, Tripadvisor, Trivago & AirBNB / Google)

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Expedia 

I invested into Expedia in February 2018 after the stock had become cheap enough. The idea was that a stock in a secular growth sector (online travel) should do well in the long run. After pretty decent fulll year 2018 numbers, with double digit increases in both, top and bottom, line, the first quarter 2019 showed a clear slowdown. Topline growth slowed to ~4%. Excluding Trivago which is still shrinking, topline sales would have grown +6%. Underlying profitability has improved although the first quarter is always the weakest one.

What I found interesting is the fact that Expedia performed better than Booking com. Here is a stock price comparison (including Tripadvisor  and Trivago):

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Travel series (5): Flight Centre – “Outsider” Company or off line Dinosaur ?

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This is part 2 of the Flight Centre analysis after the book review last week.

flight-center-image1

The “old” business model

The Australian based company is a classic “travel agency”, both, running physical agencies as well as offering airline tickets and tours over web sites.

A traditional travel agency usually works like this: They offer flights from preferred airline partners and hotels or packages also mostly from certain partner companies. Traditionally you would go into a travel agency and ask if they can recommend you a destination, then you would be offered some colorful catalogues where they list the offered hotels (with prices mostly depending on the official “star system”) and then gladly sell you the “Bundle”.

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Lastminute.com (ISIN NL0010733960) -cheap flights and a cheap stock ?

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Quick Intro:

The idea to look at lastminute.com came from my gocompare post, this is what I wrote back then:

Peter Wood hired the former CEO of lastminute.com, Mathew Crummack.

He seems to be a smart guy, however I haven’t seen anything from him about the future strategy yet. The new CFO of GoCompare ist the old deputy CFO from Esure. So the top managers from Esure seem to have preferred to stay.

I haven’t looked that deeply into LastMinute.com but it seems to do better since he left…(note to myself: check Lastminute.com).

As I have quite a lot of travel related companies on my ToDo list, I decided to start a kind of “mini travel” series, similar to my “Watch series”. As I like to travel myself a lot, I think this should be lots of fun to look into those companies.

The company

lastminute-group-logo

Lastminute.com is a company based in Switzerland which initially went public in 2014 under the (strange) name “Bravofly Rumbo”. They started out as a website to offer cheap flights in Italy and Spain.-

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