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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave who wrote (23579)	3/19/2006 8:56:48 PM
From: gcrispin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78717

Dave, My wife, who is a commercial travel agent, says that one advantage to using EXPE is availability of hotel rooms. EXPE must block space with certain hotels. For example, my wife was able to get space at the Sheraton Waikiki at Christmas on EXPE when the hotel itself said that they were sold out. In her opinion, that is their real advantage. There is no advantage using them over the airlines.

To: Dave who wrote (23579)	3/20/2006 10:18:04 AM
From: Spekulatius	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 78717

EXPE - market shares from memory: EXPE - 40% Travelocity: 20% Orbitz: 15% (?) Priceline and others share the rest. The advantage to use travel sites like Travelocity or EXPE against other means are package pricing ( Airline Ticket = hotel), availability and ease of use. booking multiple hotels and airline tickets on different websites can get a pretty big chore if one does it on different websites, but is much easier to track if done on EXPE for example. I see business travel and international business as major growth areas as most are not served well yet (I can talk from my own experience there). EXPE had more deals that Travelocity but recently this gap has shrunk and now Travelocity is almost on par.

To: Dave who wrote (23579)	3/22/2006 6:27:23 PM
From: Jurgis Bekepuris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78717

I use EXPE mostly for international hotel reservations. It has very nice interface and selection for that and I like their service too. I have also purchased air tickets on their site once in a while, but use Orbitz and United (my preferred carrier) sites more often. I did not really notice any benefits of doing air-hotel combo deals on Expedia, but maybe I am missing on savings there. IMHO hotel reservations are the only thing where I think of them first and even then I may go to hotel chain first if the destination is in US. But then I am rather obsessive/compulsive travel planner, so my experience might not be typical. OTOH, I relooked at the stock recently and did not buy. I would want much lower price based on current fundamentals if I would buy at all. Jurgis for a night