As the father of eight kids — now all between the ages of 12 and 21 — he knows a thing or two about the importance of finding the perfect place. (Note: Kaufer delicately calls family trips “adventures,” while getaways with his wife are “vacations.”)

Since then, TripAdvisor has become the online go-to destination for reviews of hotels from Barbados to bed-and-breakfasts in New York City.

In 2004, Kaufer sold the company to IAC for $210 million, setting off a somewhat complicated operating journey. A year later, TripAdvisor spun out of IAC as part of Expedia. It remained a division within the online travel agency until last month, when it broke off into an independent publicly held company.

Today, the Newton, Mass.-based company has 1,100 employees, attracts more than 50 million unique visitors and has published more than 60 million reviews. It trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TRIP,” while Expedia continues to trade under the symbol “EXPE.”

Kaufer talked to AllThingsD about being an independently traded company, and about the media company’s prospects for growth:

AllThingsD: What is it like to be out from under Expedia’s wing?

Stephen Kaufer: There was a joke when we were spun out as part of Expedia from IAC. People asked me, “What’s your vision for TripAdvisor?” I would always say, “I want to be bigger than Expedia,” and people’s response always was, “That’s what the little brother might say.”

A year or two ago, we passed Expedia in comScore metrics, and are still experiencing growth. It’s a free service that’s valuable. It’s worldwide. TripAdvisor is in 21 languages, and three-fourths of the traffic comes from outside of the U.S.

Now that you are out from under Expedia, do you have more flexibility on where you send leads that are generated from people reading reviews on TripAdvisor?

Under Expedia, we had no obligation to send traffic to them … That never happened, and we were allowed to run independently. But at the end of the day, they [competitors] knew their marketing spend was going into Expedia’s pocket. That’s the most exciting thing. We are now completely independent. Expedia now owns no stock, so when I talk to Orbitz or Priceline, these folks can now partner with TripAdvisor without any hint of helping to fuel the competitors.

Why the spinoff now?

It was announced back in April, but basically there was a view that there was a class of investors that liked a pure Internet category leader and a fast-growing media company like TripAdvisor, and there’s another class that appreciates Expedia, which is in the dominant online travel agency position.

We were blurring the two when they were together. It gives Wall Street the opportunity to invest in either, and each company will find its own set of investors.

Do you think Wall Street is correctly valuing TripAdvisor? (The stock failed to come roaring out of the gate.)

No. But I’m not complaining. I think Wall Street, over the next couple of quarters, will appreciate how both companies perform as independent companies. The numbers have been a little hidden because they were jumbled together. … They’ve never seen TripAdvisor operate independently. They ask, “What will you do differently? How will things be the same?” Watch us, and I think you’ll like what you see.

Will you grow mostly organically, or through M&A?

We have a good track record on acquisition and product innovation.

The last few acquisitions, you saw a focus on our strategic priorities: A mobile company, a social company, two vacation rental companies and a company in China. Our four key investment areas that we called out are vacation rentals, mobile, social and geographic expansion.

In many ways, TripAdvisor was one of the original social networks, where users shared information on their vacations. Now you see Facebook getting into the space with Facebook Connect and other initiatives, too.

Everyone feels like being able to get travel recommendations from their friends is a natural evolution for getting a better recommendation, period.

There’s a couple of different angles. Some social travel companies are focused on making planning a group trip easier. No site out there has scale and does that well, and we don’t do that now. Facebook is a great platform to do it on, and it may be interesting to us in the future.

Our focus is leveraging the friend graph on Facebook and our rich content to give someone the experience of seeing recommendations or ratings from friends.

We love the concept, and we are furiously building up our own product offering to make it more valuable. If it’s not too early to call someone a leader, we are clearly it, because we have the content and the friend graph. We aren’t a site that’s based on Facebook, which is an advantage, because you can do anyting you want to do on the Web or the tablet or mobile.

What about Google moving into travel?

They have a couple of different approaches. They have Google Places, which reviews everything; and they have Google Hotels, which is a hotel finder; and then Google Flights, to help you find the best fare.

With Google Places, they still can’t seem to generate enough high-quality reviews to be useful. They compete with Yelp and us, and I’ve yet to be concerned. I was concerned about Google Flights — a lot — before they launched, but you cannot book through an online travel agent like Expedia — only directly through the airlines for now.

It’s an incomplete product, so I still use TripAdvisor flights, or go to Expedia or Orbitz. They get better results, and maybe aren’t as fast, but more information is still better.

They say they want to include online travel agents, but the airlines won’t let them. … Don’t mistake my tone for being sympathetic to Google on this one.

What about vacation rentals? HomeAway went public last year.

After HomeAway, there’s not that much.

We agree it’s a great market, and it deserves to be online. It helps consumers and there’s a need to bring a trust element into the equation. Folks who have tried it have liked (renting homes), and a whole lot of people haven’t tried it, because a hotel is all they’ve ever tried.

If they are reading hotel reviews, but I see that you are trying to stay seven nights in Orlando, I might say, “Did you know that you might be able to save money and get a private swimming pool?” They never would have thought of that as an opportunity, but there’s lots of great opportunities in Orlando and tons of other cities.

HomeAway dominates the category, but there’s plenty of room for a second, third and fourth.

I’m surprised that already three-fourths of your traffic comes from outside the U.S.

Yes, and that portion is growing. We have offices all over the globe, and our biggest investment opportunity is in China. We purchased a metasearch site for air, hotel and train in China. We view international growth as a tailwind to the business.

So what’s your price target for the stock? It’s currently trading around $25 a share.

I’m looking at how I can grow the business over the long term, and that’s why we are making some of these investments. I might be ahead of it, or other folks ahead of me, but I’m a nuts-and-bolts operator. I like to build stuff, and getting TripAdvisor to the next level of functionality and awareness is my priority — not the stock price.

In April, Expedia proposed a plan that would break the business into two public companies.

One would be a travel agency, focused on selling air, hotel and car rentals, and the other would be TripAdvisor, the travel reviews site that operates in 27 countries and 19 languages.

The deal is expected to close on or about Dec. 20, including a one-for-two reverse stock split immediately prior to the spin-off. Expedia will trade under the symbol EXPE and TripAdvisor will trade under TRIP.

Today, the company filed a presentation with the Securities & Exchange Commission detailing Expedia’s standalone growth prospects. The case will be an important one to make given that TripAdvisor is often seen as the more attractive of the two companies.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company plans to present the slides to various investors and analysts over the next two-and-a-half months.

In the presentation, Expedia lists three major growth opportunities: International expansion, especially in Asia; a greater concentration on hotel bookings, which have higher margins than airplane tickets; and new distribution platforms, such as cellphones and tablets.

Expedia is a traditional travel agency that collects fees when an airfare or hotel room is booked. Meanwhile, TripAdvisor, which aggregates user-generated reviews, produces revenue from advertising, as well as fees when users book through other sites, such as Priceline or Orbitz.

In the quarter ended in September, TripAdvisor’s revenue jumped by 30 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, Expedia’s revenues rose only 14 percent.

Additionally, the company is breaking up as it faces increasing competition from Google, which has started integrating the technology of ITA, a travel software company it acquired, into its search results.

Expedia’s stock today is trading at $28.65, up 61 cents.

In an exclusive interview with AllThingsD, Robert Birge, Kayak’s chief marketing officer, said the current market is too volatile and is not meeting the company’s expectations.

“We are going to file when the market conditions are favorable to IPOs,” he said.

In the meantime, Birge said, Kayak is committed to keeping its filing up to date with the Securities and Exchange Commission, so if the conditions change, the company will be able to move quickly.

“It gives us the flexibility to respond to market conditions,” he said.

Kayak, which filed 11 months ago to raise at least $50 million, is one of roughly 200 companies that make up one of the biggest IPO backlogs in the past five years.

Two other high-profile examples are Groupon, the daily deals site that wants to raise $750 million, and Zynga, the social games maker that is seeking $1 billion in additional funding.

Kara Swisher reported last week that despite copious amounts of negative press, Groupon has no plans to back down from going public. Likewise, according to our sources, Zynga’s IPO remains on track.

Birge was not able to elaborate on the company’s plans or whether it was seeking alternate exits, like a sale or staying private and raising more cash. The Norwalk, Conn.-based company updated its filing recently to suggest it was looking at other alternatives as an IPO became less likely.

But unlike Groupon or Zynga, which filed this summer to go public, Kayak has had nearly a year to pull the trigger, which predates much of the market volatility, raising the question of why it has taken Kayak so long.

Birge said even if the market conditions are right, the SEC must sign off on the offering in order to go public.

Perhaps the market will be more favorable once there are more comparable companies with positive valuations. Already there are a number of other public competitors, including Priceline, Orbitz and Expedia.

One big public event coming up will be Expedia’s spin off of TripAdvisor, which will create two separately traded entities. In that scenario, Expedia’s results would no longer also include TripAdvisor’s advertising business, and Expedia alone could more closely resemble Kayak’s business.

You can probably guess what it is: A search engine that helps you sort through flight information and fares. It’s not exactly going to knock your socks off, but it’s an indicator of things to come. Google has said in the past that it thinks there’s still room for innovation in the travel search and booking market.

One thing I noticed is that you can already see flight information showing up in regular Google search queries highlighted by a tiny blue airplane in the results.

Google produced a video showing the service in action, which I’ve embedded below.

Now it looks as if News.me is just about ready for public consumption. I’m basing that observation on a new Web site that spells out, in great detail, how the app is supposed to work, and which instructs users to head to iTunes to download the app.

As I’m typing this, News.me still isn’t available in the app store. So it’s possible that the new web page is simply a new web page. Perhaps it’s just an exercise in positive thinking–maybe this will force Apple into approving our app!

[UPDATE: "Our understanding is that News.me is launching tomorrow", says New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy; the Times is aware of News.me's plans because it helped develop the project in its early stages (see below). I've asked Bit.ly for comment but haven't heard back yet.]

At a minimum, though, we can learn a lot about what Bit.ly has planned when News.me does launch.

The basics:

• News.me will cost $0.99 a week, or $34.99 a year. It will be available as an iPad app, using Apple’s subscription service, or as an e-mail newsletter.
• News.me will provide users with curated Twitter streams that highlight “the most popular or interesting news stories” that appear in their own Twitter feeds, and from the feeds of other Twitter users they select. The notion is that users can “read over the shoulder” of people they find interesting.
• Bit.ly does the curating, using the data it culls as it shortens billions of shared links on the Web. Since News.me relies on Bit.ly data, it has a natural bias toward publishers that use the service.
• News.me lets users read those stories in a “streamlined reading view,” which will be familiar to anyone who has used apps like Instapaper: easy-to-read black text on a white background–without the ads users see when they read the same stuff on a publisher’s Web page.
• News.me will share some of its revenue with publishers who license their content to the service. But publishers who don’t have News.me deals but do appear on the Web will still see their stuff show up on the service. It just won’t look as nice, and they won’t get paid. And they won’t get the chance to run “additional promotion for publisher products that might be of special interest to News.me users (such as iPad applications).”

You can get a pretty good sense of how the app works by reading TechCrunch’s “exclusive” from February. Or you could just ask many of the people whose work often appears on Techmeme. A whole lot of writers and bloggers–including me–have had a chance to play with News.me for a while.

When News.me finally does go live, potential users will have to debate whether they want to pay a fee to read stuff they can get for free on the Web.

But to me, the most interesting thing about News.me is that it’s an aggregator blessed by some publishers that haven’t always been hospitable to aggregators.

There’s the New York Times, for starters, which handed over the beginnings of the service to Bit.ly in exchange for cash and equity. And the Associated Press, which often butts heads with the Web, has signed on, too.

So have Forbes, and AOL and many of its sub-brands, and a good chunk of the blogosphere–Gawker Media, Business Insider, Gigaom, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc. (I believe–but haven’t confirmed–that neither All Things Digital nor News Corp., which owns the site, have a deal with News.me.)

The Times and the Associated Press also work with Ongo, another aggregation subscription service. But Ongo only uses content from publishers it has deals with.

News.me, though, charges money for a service built using other people’s work–even if those people haven’t signed on.

Which is what the Times has complained about in the past–like last summer, when it forced Apple to pull the Pulse newsreader out of its app store. The AP has engaged in similar fist-shaking aimed at Google and the Internet at large.

Here’s News.me’s defense of its model:

Because News.me generally provides a small subset of a publisher’s content, filtered by user actions and News.me algorithms, it is not a substitute for publishers’ own web sites or iPad applications. And, since it exposes users to content they likely wouldn’t otherwise see, it can broaden the audience and, through related-content links, drive new unique users to publisher web sites.

Which is reasonable enough. Everything on the Web gets shared and sampled; if you’re a publisher trying to build or keep an audience, trying to prevent that is counterproductive.

And News.me’s curated browsing conceit–there’s no search function, and you can’t subscribe to a publication-specific feed–makes it worthless for anyone trying to use it to game publishers. This won’t work as a permanent ad-blocker, or a paywall-jumping aid.

I still won’t be surprised to see some publishers who haven’t signed on rattling their sabers when News.me launches–just like the Times and the AP have in the past. Glad to see they’ve come around.

After roughly nine months of antitrust scrutiny, the justice department has approved Google’s acquisition of ITA, acting quickly before the government faces a potentially shutdown due to budget disputes. And, not surprisingly, all parties involved are claiming victory.

Google announced an agreement to acquire ITA Software, a Cambridge, Massachusetts flight information software company, for $700 million in July 2010.

The acquisition was immediately identified as a threat to companies, such as Kayak and Orbitz, which rely on ITA’s data. Likewise, the federal regulators took the opportunity to take a close look at the deal’s ability to fuel Google’s continuing search dominance. However, the deal was largely expected to be rubber stamped because it represented a vertical expansion for Google, and not a gain in general market share.

The concessions laid out by the Department of Justice today has calmed the nerves of the deal’s harshest critics.

“This is a clear win from our perspective,” said Tom Barnett, counsel to Expedia, and former head of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department during a call organized by FairSearch.org, an advocacy group that opposed the acquisition. “We are very happy about that, but we are also aware of the fact that this is one transaction in one section of the Internet. We do think that it’s important that people bare that in mind and remain vigilant.”

The two biggest concerns by ITA’s customers was that the company’s data would remain available to them and that Google would not have access to their proprietary data.

Under the terms of the agreement, the department will require Google to establish internal firewall procedures to ensure competitors’ intellectual property and that ITA’s customers will be able to extend their contracts into 2016. New customers are also ensured that they will be able to license ITA’s software on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” into 2016. What’s more, the proposed settlement provides for a formal reporting mechanism for complainants if Google acts in an unfair manner.

On the same call, Kayak’s Chief Marketing Officer Robert Birge, said that Google’s likely happy with the terms because it got what it ultimately wanted — to acquire ITA. But that doesn’t mean that the terms weren’t vigilant enough to make customers of ITA happy, too.

“Their deal got cleared, so of course they are going to spin it how they like, but the Justice department has taken action to ensure competition. We are still looking at the specific details, but from a cursory look, it’s clear they protected our access and have protected our own proprietary technology that we’ve developed over the past seven years. It’s unambiguous to us that this is pleasing to us.”

We’re sure the deal’s closure after nine months also is pleasing to ITA’s investor list.

As soon as the court accepts the Justice Department’s proposal, you can imagine the $700 millions being distributed to all parties involved. In 2006, ITA closed $100 million in equity investment. Its investor list includes: Sequoia Capital, Battery Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, PAR Investment Partners and Spectrum Equity Investors.

In a short statement by Google, Jeff Huber, Google’s SVP of Commerce and Local, was enthusiastic about the Justice Department’s actions: “We’re moving to close this acquisition as soon as possible, and then we’ll start the important work of bringing our teams and products together. We’re confident that by combining ITA’s expertise with Google’s technology we’ll be able to develop exciting new flight search tools for all our users. Up, up and away!”

This doesn’t mean that Google is entirely in the clear.

As Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski wrote earlier this week, Larry Page has a lot to look forward to as his tenure as CEO, such as a European probe of the company’s search and advertising operations, a Texas investigation into allegations of “manual overriding or altering of” search result rankings, and perhaps that long-in-the-works Federal Trade Commission probe.

One would be a travel agency, focused on selling air, hotel and car rentals and the other would be TripAdvisor, the travel reviews site that operates in 27 countries and 19 languages.

The split-up was a surprise today, many brows furrowed as to the significance of the timing, since the travel industry is facing a number of major disruptions.

Today, reports said Google and the Justice Department could ink a deal over the next couple of days that would allow the search giant to purchase flight-data company ITA Software for $700 million. One of its biggest partners, Kayak.com, is also zeroing on its IPO. Kayak is also beginning to book hotel rooms directly with its customers, rather than always redirecting to other sites, such as Expedia.

But much of the thought process has to do with what Expedia thinks its business is worth, compared to Wall Street’s valuation.

While Expedia’s travel agency business garners the most attention, it is TripAdvisor that has the bigger growth story, but in many respects is hampered by being tucked under Expedia’s  much larger wings.

Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told the WSJ that TripAdvisor is now big enough to be on its own. “It is a matter of size, globalization and diversification of revenues…It is really ready to stand on its own.”

On its own, it could be worth as much as $4 billion, according to some estimates, which is way above the $237 million Expedia purchased it for in 2004.

TripAdvisor makes money from advertising as well as from affiliate fees when users book through other sites, such as Priceline or Orbitz. TripAdvisor is the high-growth and high-margin business of Expedia today.

In 2010, TripAdvisor’s revenues totaled $486 million, up 38 percent compared to the year-ago period. Operating income in 2010 totaled $260 million, increasing 33 percent year over year. Its margins are slightly above 50 percent. Contrast that to Expedia’s overall transaction business, which is much larger, but is seeing a more modest annual growth at 20 percent.

But a lot of that growth story is not as easy to see on the surface.

Meanwhile, one of Expedia’s largest competitors, Priceline, continues to be appreciated in the public markets. Its stock hit a recent 52-week high after one analyst boosted its price target to $610 from $575.

In after hours trading yesterday, Expedia shares jumped 14 percent to $25.51 after closing $22.40 in the regular session. Today, Citi Investment reiterated its Buy rating at a $29 price point and called it a value play.

Not all analysts believe the break-up is the right thing to do.

Fitch Ratings, which is watching closely to see how the plan will affect the company’s bond ratings, wrote that TripAdvisor as a stand-alone entity will likely represent a significant new competitor to Expedia. It believes that TripAdvisor will now have much more flexibility to pursue a model that’s similar to competitors such as Kayak, which can promote hotel direct bookings in favor of directing traffic to online travel agencies, such as Expedia.

That is a particular concern because a large majority of Expedia’s revenue comes from hotel bookings, which has higher margins than airplane tickets.

Starting today, the additional category takes off, offering steep discounts to hotel rooms around in about 30 locations.

The launch of Overstock’s vacation category–its fifth new category since 1999–marks a substantial investment for the publicly held company.

The decision to pick travel is in line with what Gilt Groupe’s Jetsetter and LivingSocial.com’s Escapes are doing in terms of offering occasional deals to certain locations. With all of them, the focus is on price, not selection.

But rather than Gilt’s high-end affluent niche and LivingSocial’s curated-packaged approach, Overstock’s inventory is more for the masses–something you’d expect from Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline or Travelocity.

On day one, the choices will vary.

Three nights at the Crowne Plaza London at Heathrow costs $207.85 per person during May. In June, the four-star Renaissance New Orleans Marquette Hotel will run $238.14 per person for three nights. A perfectly decent hotel in Honolulu, which is a little drab and is across the street from the beach, will cost $351.25 per person for seven nights.

But how much you are saving is not exactly obvious.

“We’d love to put the rack rates up there, and if you go to other travel sites, you’ll see these are slick deals, but at the moment we aren’t putting up the rack rate,” said Overstock’s CEO Patrick Byrne. “The suppliers would like to make it not so transparent.”

The Vacations tab will be featured prominently at the top of the web site, along with the other categories of Shopping, Cars, Real Estate and Auctions.

The addition follows other recent launches by Overstock, including Eziba.com, which focuses on selling a small number of items, ranging from furniture to jewelry, at heavily discounted prices via a daily email.

As for the Vacations business, Byrne said they’ve hired a dedicated sales team to source the deals. “We have been working on it for about a year, and we believe we can expand the cities and inventory very quickly.”

The deals are colorfully laid out on the page to highlight the scenery in each location. They can sell out, or at least that’s the hope.

“This is the equivalent of a private shopping site. They will sell out and quickly. Or, at least we hope so, and then we’ll go get more,” Byrne said.

In doing so, it moves from an independent third-party aggregator to a competitor of the hundreds of travel sites it compares on a regular basis, such as Hotels.com, Hotwire, Priceline and Expedia.

The feature was released today in a limited beta, and will be fully functional in a few weeks, both online and on its iPhone application.

Since Kayak was founded seven years ago, it has been aggregating airline and hotel listings from hundreds of sources to give visitors the best options and price. But it was not known for selling directly to the consumer.

The company, which has filed for an initial public offering, traditionally has earned revenue from sending referral traffic to companies like Expedia and Orbitz. In fact, Expedia accounted for 25 percent of its revenues in the first nine months of 2010, and Orbitz made up 19 percent of its revenues.

In that period, it generated $128 million in revenue and processed more than 469 million user queries for travel information.

Now, the Norwalk, Conn.-based company has decided to go head-to-head with some of its biggest customers.

To do so, the company is partnering with the Travelocity Partner Network, which will be processing the transactions and providing customer service to anyone who books directly on Kayak.

In an interview, Paul English, Kayak’s co-founder and CTO, told us he believes the two businesses can co-exist because they still provide an extremely low-cost lead generator for all of their partners.

While the feature is being rolled out online and on mobile, he said the decision to start booking directly had more to do with the consumer’s experience on the mobile phone.

In a statement, Steve Hafner, Kayak’s CEO and Cofounder, said: “Our users value that we give them choices on where to book, though some people would prefer to complete their purchases without leaving KAYAK…For people who use KAYAK’s mobile app in particular, this will make booking much easier.”

Currently, if a customer is searching for a hotel and wants to book something, they will be kicked out of the app and redirected to another company’s web site in the browser in order to pay for it.

The poor experience causes many people to drop off, and conversion rates are low.

If the transaction can be completed inside the application, a user’s payment options can be stored, and it can be completed in a couple of clicks.

English would not say how much traffic its mobile application is getting, however, as one of the more popular travel apps on the iPhone, it makes up a notable number of its three million daily searches, he said.

So far, its mobile applications have been downloaded more than five million times, and he said there are some users who only search Kayak from the phone.

Users can query Room 77 in advance to request a room, and they can also use the company’s iPhone app to make quick decisions about which room to take when offered at the front desk. The company has results for 2,500 three-star and above hotels in North America and the UK, including room category, square footage, bed type and elevator proximity.

The company gets its room map data through direct relationships with hotels (it’s working on a larger deal with Starwood), sending staffers to examine hotels themselves, and from users taking pictures of the floorplan maps on the back of their room doors.

You see a lot of people trying to innovate around travel search and discovery these days by improving user experience, social features and the like. To Room 77′s credit, it’s breaking off a novel aspect of travel, though I wonder how many people care enough to download an app to get the best room.

The Sunnyvale, Calif company is run and funded by all sorts of online travel nuts. Founder and chairman Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital sold two travel start-ups and is on the board of Orbitz. VP Engineering Calvin Yang worked on image search at Google and then founded a travel start-up called OpTrip that’s now part of Room 77. GM and VP Product Kevin Fliess was co-founder and CEO of TravelMuse.

Room 77 was founded in 2009 and raised $3 million last year. Here’s the list of backers from the press release: “Rich Barton (founder of Expedia and Zillow), Erik Blachford (former president and CEO of IAC Travel), Bob Pittman (founder of MTV), and Hugh Crean (former president and CEO of Farecast), among others. Other investors include Par Capital Management, an early investor in ITA, Farecast, and Orbitz; Sutter Hill Ventures, which also invested in Farecast; and Felicis Ventures.”

Update: Room 77 was the judges’ pick of the 10 companies presenting at the Launch conference in San Francisco on Thursday morning. (And AllThingsD‘s Kara Swisher was one of the judges.)

Bloomberg reported today that agency staffers are preparing documents for use in a possible case against Google, but a decision on whether or not to bring a case hasn’t been made. Google–clearly eager to get the deal closed, as it has been six months since it first moved to acquire ITA in July–invoked a federal law that gives the government 30 days to rule thumbs up or thumbs down.

Since then numerous companies, as varied as Microsoft, Expedia and Travelocity, have opposed the deal and formed a coalition called Fairsearch.org to air concerns that Google could stop other companies that depend on ITA’s technology from using it, though Google has said it will continue to offer licenses after the deal closes. Orbitz Worldwide supports is neutral on the deal.

Aside: Remember when NBC and “Saturday Night Live” didn’t really want their stuff on the Web? Now they make stuff designed for Internet distribution–note shout-outs here to Amazon, Orbitz, Facebook, FarmVille, Netflix and Angry Birds. And porn!

This is SNL’s second crack at Assange. Last week, it imagined what he’d do if he morphed into Harvey Levin. Also quite good!

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As I noted in a post yesterday, Expedia observed on its post-earnings conference call that the softness the company had been seeing in the U.S. and the U.K. earlier in the year has now extended to “nearly all” geographies and all key product areas, including air, hotels and car rentals. The company indicated that transactions dropped off during the week Lehman went bankrupt, and have not rebounded much since.

This morning, several analysts cut ratings on the stock.

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• Orbitz: Target to $5, from $8. EPS estimate for 2008 to loss of 17 cents from loss of 15 cents; 2009 to loss of seven cents from positive 19 cents.
• Expedia: Target to $19, from $30; 2008 to $1.38 from $1.40; 2009 to $1.42, from $1.59.
• Priceline: Target to $90, from $154; 2008 to $5.43, from $5.75; 2009 to $5.80, from $7.15.

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