Longer-term consumer travel trends are ‘healthy’: Expedia CEO

Many consumer brands have seen a slowdown in consumer spending as inflation remains high, but how is the travel sector faring under instances of consumer pullbacks?

Expedia Group (EXPE) CEO Ariane Gorin joins Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi in-studio to talk about the state of consumer travel and Vrbo’s path to growth. Gorin assumed the role of chief executive in May after working for the company for 11 years and serving as the President of Expedia for Business since 2021.

“For the last few quarters, we’ve actually seen some pressure on pricing on the air ticket prices and car rental prices. And, you know, over the last few years, we’d actually seen those going up. So we’ve seen some softening there. And then at the beginning of the third quarter, we started to see some softening on hotels, so what we call the average daily rates there. We’ve seen some beginnings of consumers trading down from sort of a higher star rating hotel to a slightly lower, and it’s early days, but we’re keeping our eye on it,” Gorin explains.

While she expects a bit of a slowdown in the third quarter, the fourth quarter should pick back up, when she believes “the longer-term trends are going to be healthy.” Gorin warned of softening consumer demand in the travel booker’s second quarter earnings beat reported last week.

While Vrbo did not get off to a great start this year, Gorin explains that the platform offers “great value proposition for travelers… really a trusted brand for them to go to.

“We were quite direct about the fact that the first quarter was not a strong quarter for Vrbo. We had gone through a tech migration where we’d re-platformed the front end of Vrbo onto our platform. And that brought along a lot of positives,” Gorin says. “So, for example, the ability to be in our loyalty program to be on our common testing platform, but it also meant that we took some steps back, some functionality that we had had on Vrbo that we had lost and we’re building all of that back. We saw great acceleration through the second quarter. And, you know, we’re very positive about the long-term outlook for the brand.”

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination.

This post was written by Melanie Riehl