Here are 1-2 brief analogies for Expedia:

• Amazon for booking all your travel needs.
• Walmart.com for planning and reserving trips.

• Online Travel Agency (OTA) Services: This core offering provides consumers with platforms (e.g., Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Travelocity) to search, compare, and book flights, hotels, car rentals, and complete vacation packages.
• Vacation Rental Platform (Vrbo): A global marketplace connecting travelers with a diverse inventory of private homes, apartments, and unique vacation properties for short-term stays.
• Travel Metasearch Engine (Trivago): An independent hotel metasearch platform that aggregates and compares hotel prices from numerous online booking sites and direct hotel channels.
• B2B Travel Solutions: Provides a range of technology, wholesale rates, and booking services to airlines, hotels, loyalty programs, and other businesses within the travel industry.

Expedia Group (symbol: EXPE) primarily sells its services to individual customers, making it a business-to-consumer (B2C) company. Its various brands, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, and Orbitz, are platforms designed for individuals to book travel components such as flights, hotels, vacation rentals, car rentals, and activities.

Based on its primary sales to individuals, Expedia serves the following major categories of customers:

• Leisure Travelers: This is the broadest and largest customer segment, encompassing individuals, couples, and families planning vacations, weekend getaways, and holiday trips. These customers typically seek a comprehensive platform to book all aspects of their personal travel, prioritizing convenience, a wide selection of options, and ease of planning for a variety of destinations and trip types.

• Budget-Conscious Travelers: This category includes individuals who prioritize cost savings and actively seek the best deals, discounts, and package savings for their trips. Expedia's platforms, with their robust price comparison tools, promotional offers, and bundled packages (e.g., flight + hotel deals), are highly attractive to this segment, helping them maximize value within their travel budget.

• Vacation Rental Seekers: Through its Vrbo brand, Expedia Group specifically targets individuals and families who prefer staying in private homes, apartments, condos, or unique accommodations rather than traditional hotels. These customers are often looking for more space, amenities like full kitchens, privacy, and a more localized or distinct travel experience, especially for family vacations, group trips, or longer stays.

Google's increasing dominance and direct integration into the travel booking ecosystem through products like Google Flights, Google Hotels, and Google Travel.

Google leverages its search engine monopoly to present its own travel offerings prominently, often above or alongside traditional online travel agencies (OTAs) in search results. By aggregating inventory, facilitating price comparisons, and enabling bookings directly through its platform or via preferred partners, Google is increasingly disintermediating OTAs from the initial travel discovery and booking process. This trend threatens to reduce direct traffic to Expedia's branded sites, increase customer acquisition costs as Expedia must compete for visibility on Google's platform, and ultimately erode Expedia's market share by consolidating the user journey within the Google ecosystem.