Duff on Hospitality Law

Good Sunday morning from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, November 7, 2025, is below. Expedia’s quarterly earnings report garnered most of the attention this week as Expedia reported relatively strong third quarter results. We’ll include a transcript from this week’s earning release call in next week’s Update. Enjoy.

• • Expedia Posts Better Than Expected Quarterly Earnings. Expedia’s third quarter earnings reflected continued strength in its B2B business and a stabilizing B2C business. Here are a few of the key numbers:
    • Company-wide revenue grew 9% YOY to $4.4 billion (B2B revenue grew 18% YOY)
    • Advertising revenue grew 16% YOY
    • Company-wide gross bookings grew 12% YOY (B2B bookings grew 26% and B2C bookings grew by 7%)
    • Booked room nights grew by 11% (outpacing competitors Airbnb and Booking.com for the quarter)

When asked during the earnings call about Expedia’s current AI efforts, CEO Ariane Goren noted that the Company had two primary priorities – ensuring that its brands and content appeared in responses to users’ prompts on the major AI platforms and directing traffic from those platforms back to Expedia. Goren’s comments regarding the leads received by Expedia from popular AI platforms mirrored those of Booking Holdings’ Glenn Fogel just a week earlier - few leads today but growing and good quality.

• • AI, AI Agents and Corporate Travel. For the past few months now, the industry (us too) has focused almost exclusively on AI and AI agents and their effect on leisure travel. What about managed and corporate travel? What complexities do travel policy compliance, expense management and duty of care obligations introduce? According to recent comments from some of the largest corporate travel players, these added complications will make it impossible to replace TMCs and expense platforms entirely. Sounds like self-preservation talk to me. From my perspective, as AI tools are perfected in leisure travel, their extension into corporate and managed travel (and their complex data sets, which seem like natural fits for AI) seems inevitable. Anyone agree?
  • What Lessons Can Be Learned from Airlines and ChatGPT? According to recent research conducted by PROS, an airline retailing and revenue management company, referrals from leading AI platforms to airline websites is growing quickly. In September of this year, ChatGPT accounted for 2.3% of all referral traffic from search engines to airline websites (this number is up from 1.8% in August). While the importance of AI platforms may be increasingly generally, airlines may have a hard time benefitting from the increased usage. According to PROS, a wide margin of the traffic generated through ChatGPT today goes to OTAs and metasearch sites and not airlines themselves. Note that these results are quite different than the results of the AI behavioral study by Propellic that we featured in an earlier post, but they may be indicative of where hotel search is going in the future.

Have a great week everyone.