Expedia Gets a Bland Coat of Paint

The mid 1990s was a bad time for travel agents, that’s when Travelocity (1996) and Expedia (1995) first launched, and although it took a few more years before online booking killed the travel agent, the writing was on the wall. I’m a Travelocity Man by default, yet I have dabbled in Expedia a few times, mostly because at some points its booking fee was five dollars less than Travelocity’s, but I think this points to the larger, ongoing rivalry between the two main booking sites — Orbitz and Kayak are fine, but maybe suffer from bell-and-whistle syndrome. Expedia was first launched as a division within Microsoft and it was spun off as Expedia Inc., an independent and publicly traded company in 1999, it was then purchased by Ticketmaster in 2001 and in 2005 it spun of