TripAdvisor into Vacation rental through purchase of FlipKey

Another play by TripAdvisor. This time they have acquired vacation rental player FlipKey. Hotelmarking.com has the press release here. Even though FlipKey is an accommodation provider don't confuse them with an intermediary like the Expedia owned Hotels.com. If I understand the FlipKey model correctly they are a listing service. They charge either or both of a listing fee and per email referral fee. In other words it is an online version of a yellow pages or pay for listing directly. I don't mean that to be a negative or derogatory, rather to highlight that it is an advertising business (like the rest of the TripAdvisor Media Network) not a retail business (like the Expedia business).

I am continuing my updated list of their acquisitions.

    Flipkey
    Airfarewatchdog.com
    OneTime.com
    Virtual Tourist
    HolidayWatchdog
    smartertravel.com
    bookingbuddy.com;
    TravelPod.com;
    Travel-Library.com;
    SeatGuru.com; and
    Cruisecritic.com.

I always close these stories with the reminder that Expedia owns TripAdvisor as you'd be surprised how much search traffic I get asking the question "who owns TripAdvisor"

Source: http://tims-boot.blogspot.in/2008/08/tripadvisor-into-vacation-rental.html

Note:

Delta Ray is experienced web scraping consultant and writes articles on Hotels Data Scraping, Hotelpronto, Expedia, Tripadvisor Data Scraping, Amazon Product Scraping, Linkedin Email Scraping, Screen Scraping Services, Yelp Review Scraping and yellowpages data scraping etc.