Expedia and Groupon Sell 15,000 Travel Deals in Three Days

In case you were wondering why well-known brands Expedia and Groupon would team up to sell discounts on travel, it’s because of the massive scale the two can reach together.

Expedia announced today as part of its second-quarter earnings that customers bought 15,000 travel deals within three days of it launching an exclusive partnership with Groupon.

The partnership went live on July 11, offering a dozen or so travel discounts that let people book hotel rooms and airfare at half the cost for destinations around the world. The two companies announced the partnership in June at the D Conference, before Groupon CEO Andrew Mason appeared on stage.

On the company’s conference call, it added that when the partnership launched, it offered roughly 25 deals, almost all of which sold out.

So far, it said the deals that have performed the best are for big tourist destinations in the U.S., like Las Vegas. The ones that have had a harder time are foreign destinations that require booking an international flight.

Another interesting detail the Bellevue, Wash.-based travel site revealed today was that collectively its mobile applications are downloaded an average of 36 times every minute, which is an increase of about 20 percent compared to the first quarter.

In March, the company unveiled its new mobile strategy, which included launching standalone hotel-booking applications. Expedia now has a variety of apps on both iPhone and Android for multiple brands, including Expedia, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor and Hotwire’s Travel-Ticker.

In the second quarter, Expedia reported a profit of $140.4 million on revenues of $1 billion. In the same period a year ago, it recorded a profit of $114.3 million on revenues of $834 million.

The company said higher revenues were driven by a 21 percent increase in hotel room nights year over year, and 27 percent increase in advertising and media revenue from its TripAdvisor division.

As previously announced, Expedia intends on spinning off its TripAdvisor business into a separate publicly traded company. It has filed the preliminary proxy statement required to complete the transaction, but has not announced when shareholders will vote on the spin-off.

The company’s stock jumped $2.26 a share, or 7.8 percent in after-hours trading to close at $31.25, regaining ground after falling 77 cents a share during regular hours.

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