Priceline says some of the proceeds from its just-announced $500 million convertible-note offering may be used for corporate acquisitons, leading Susquehanna Financial Group to speculate that Priceline engineered the move because it may have felt it needed to match Expedia’s $1 billion warchest for future acquisitions.

Expedia and Priceline, of course, are at loggerheads across Europe and Asia over their respective hotel businesses. And, both companies would admit that Priceline has been the more solid executioner, so to speak.

In a note to investors from financial analysts Marianne Wolk and Malindi Davies, Susquehanna Financial Group argues that Priceline has a history of acquisitions, including Booking.com and Agoda, and that its future M & A activity may include broadening Priceline’s reach in Asia and Latin America, or diversifying its business by picking up a mobile company.

Susquehanna says a metasearch acquisition is a possibility, but less of a priority for Priceline.

Kayak would be “the only real target” for Priceline among the metasearchers, says Susquehanna, but such a transaction is doubtful because Priceline already gets a whole bunch of traffic from Kayak.

In fact, Susquehanna says, in January “Kayak was Priceline’s fifth largest source of traffic worldwide.”

Officials from both Expedia and Priceline have stated they would be open to opportunistic acquisitions in 2010, and now the two online kingmakers are building their respective warchests to make that happen.

Susquehanna’s views are consistent with the prevailing belief that consolidation among major online travel agencies is not on the immediate agenda.

Expedia has appointed a new online advertising agency for Europe as the company gears up to roll out its new branding from the US.

Essence will handle planning and buying for digital ads on other consumer sites in the continent but will not be involved in the wider creative work involved in the recent rebranding.

The appointment is part of a plan to consolidate media buying across 12 separate networks in Europe, a typical method of coordinating schedules during large scale promotion work around a rebranding.

The online travel agency giant unveiled its new identity in January 2010 with the promise of a global roll out (though not necessarily with the much talked about “Where You Book Matters” tagline in each market) in the coming months.

Essence is said to be charged with making a dedicated push into the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark for the Expedia business.

Accommodation rental specialist giant HomeAway has moved quickly to deny suggestions that it will list on the public markets.

Expedia chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi told a conference in San Francisco yesterday that he expected the venture-backed company to go to the financial markets in 2010 or 2011.

The well-timed and very public statement came out of the blue in terms of adding a new name to the list of those travel and technology outfits expected to launch IPOs this year.

Nevertheless, HomeAway hit back quickly today with a short statement following Khosrowshahi’s comments.

An official says:

“We are extremely pleased with the success we have experienced to date, but there are no plans for an IPO at this moment in time.”

Those with a keen eye for language and sentence formation will note the “at this moment in time” element to the statement. The statement also refers to an IPO, rather than simply “going public”.

Khosrowshahi’s prediction may have been aimed at HomeAway for wider reasons – to draw attention to the company’s structure and financial position amid ongoing speculation that one of the big OTAs will take a look at some of the bigger players in the accommodation rental sector later this year in order to tap into the growing marketplace.

Breaking new ground, Expedia launched a new iPhone app, TripAssist, which enables users to track itineraries booked on Travelocity, Opodo or Agoda — any travel website, actually — in addition to those booked in-house on Expedia.

The feature take a different approach than competitors’ tacks as Travelocity for iPhone and Priceline Hotel Negotiator for iPhone, for example, don’t handle views of what might be called extraterrestrial itineraries.

A previous iPhone app, Expedia Itinerary Viewer, took a more pedestrian approach as it only allowed mobile users to manage Expedia-booked itineraries.

The breaking down of the Expedia walled garden which characterized  Expedia Itinerary Viewer, launched last year, has to be seen as a bow to the trend buoyed by itinerary-management providers TripIt, TripCase, Traxo, WorldMate, Kayak and numerous others.

Most of these itinerary-management offerings take an agnostic approach to where bookings are made.

Expedia obviously isn’t agnostic about it, but it has opened its world view a bit.

According to iTunes, other new features of Expedia’s new, free app include:

• The ability to view airline seats via Expedia/TripAdvisor’s SeatGuru;

• Flight alerts via SMS and e-mail;

• The ability to shop and book on Expedia’s mobile website;

• A “billboard” view with additional destination information when travelers flip their iPhone during trips:

• The ability to view alternative flights via one-button access.

Expedia says travelers can also request changes and cancellations through TripAssist without being subject to additional fees.

Score another small victory for the online travel agencies in the hotel-tax skirmishes: In a majority opinion,  the Philadelphia County Tax Review Board upheld Expedia’s petition and dismissed the city’s hotel-tax assessment.

The board stated that the basis of its decision was that Expedia does not fall within the law’s “definition of [an] operator.”

Occupancy tax laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and the crux of the issue revolves around whether the OTAs can be considered hotel operators. The Philadelphia County Tax Review Board held that Expedia is not a hotel operator under local law.

The city has 30 days from the Feb. 9 decision to appeal it to the Court of Common pleas.

Bizarre turn of events in the row between Expedia and technology blog TechCrunch as it is now claimed that the disputed faxes at the centre of the tale did not exist.

In the original scathing article about an Expedia booking on Valentine’s Day which went wrong, writer MG Siegler asserted – and lamented – that faxes were at the centre of the saga.

The controversial writer was unable to stay in his chosen hotel on arrival as the property failed to have any record of his booking.

Siegler slammed the OTA for its continued use of faxes, but Expedia hit back and claimed faxed confirmations were only used if a hotel requested such a service.

Nevertheless, Expedia launched an investigation “led at the highest level” following Siegler’s public outburst on TechCrunch.

Within days, Siegler received a full apology from Expedia, a full refund and a credit voucher with the agency. The writer posted the full response from Expedia on TechCrunch.

Bizarrely, it has since emerged that there was no connection between the hotel and Expedia, bookings being filtered through to the property via a third party connection.

“Despite reports to the contrary, a fax machine did not play any role in this situation,” an official says.

When pressed further about the fax element to the story, given that Siegler concentrated much of his original ire on the issue, an Expedia official says the following:

“I do not know how the fax component became a part of this story, but if MG Siegler heard from any party that faxes played a role in this issue, then that is not accurate.”

Siegler was contacted regarding this latest chapter but says he considers the issue closed after receiving the full apology from Expedia.

The Expedia-TechCrunch squabble over a missing faxed-hotel confirmation points to a little-known fact: Faxes may be dying in the hotel industry, but they still have plenty of life and play an ongoing role.

Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz Worldwide and Priceline’s Booking.com, to name a few travel sellers, all still fax booking confirmations in some instances.

Take a look at this Hotel Partners FAQ on Booking.com.

It reads, in part:

Q: How do we receive the confirmation for a reservation?

A: You will receive the confirmation by fax. (After a booking is made online).

Over at Orbitz Worldwide, spokesman Brian Hoyt says a minority of hotels use an extranet for its merchant-hotel program, and about 5% of this minority choose to receive their booking confirmations from Orbitz via fax.

And, where is it most common?

Shockingly, Hoyt says the use of faxes by hoteliers in the Orbitz merchant program is most prevalent in the U.S., then Europe, “and then it falls off.”

He points out that in some rural areas hoteliers may still be using dial-up, and sometimes prefer faxes over e-mail.

For hotels that choose to receive the confirmations from Orbitz via fax, the process occurs like this:

1. The hotel provides inventory via the extranet.

2. The consumer books the hotel online or over the phone.

3. Orbitz faxes the hotel a booking confirmation and recieves a confirmation that the fax went through.

4. The hotel closes out the inventory on the extranet.

Hoyt says the process works well, although occasionally there can be problems with over-bookings at major events such as the Super Bowl, a presidential Inauguration or the Olympics if hotels don’t close out inventory after receiving the faxed confirmations.

At Travelocity, spokesman Joel Frey says a “small” percentage of hoteliers in its merchant-hotel program choose to receive confirmations via fax.

“We instituted a behind-the-scenes program several years ago where our customer service team calls on properties receiving fax confirmations to ensure that Travelocity bookings are confirmed,” Frey says. “It has been successful for us.”

Expedia, too, with all its direct-connect programs for large and midsize chains, confirms that it faxes confirmations to some hotels.

The reduction in the use of faxes in the travel industry over the last decade caused the American Society of Travel Agents to cease tracking the use of faxes by travel agents as a separate category in its annual Supplier-Travel Agent Relationship Reports, but Research Director Melissa Teates believes the use of faxes for bookings may fall within the “Other” category in the following chart:

So, it’s clear, the use of faxes may have diminished from their heyday, but they indeed live on.

Which means, when you book a hotel online or offline, follow the advice of Darren Cronian of Travel Rants: Always call the hotel to confirm your reservation.

Reports today suggesting Ryanair has settled out of court with Expedia over their ill-fated partnership has thrown the spotlight once again on the airline’s white label deals.

Both Expedia and Ryanair are refusing to discuss any aspect of the case or the apparent settlement between the two, preferring various twists on the phrase “inappropriate to comment”, or “not discussing this issue” when contacted.

The case ran (not continuously) from late-2008 until a point this month when, presumably, both agreed to shake hands on a deal.

Expedia was initially being asked to cough up around £4 million after Ryanair claimed failure of payment by the OTA during its contract to supply hotel search and bookings functionality to the airline’s website.

This will not be the first time Ryanair has trousered some money from an old white label provider.

Rewind a few years and Ryanair was reported to have secured Euro 10 million from the Cendant Corporation after accommodation brand Needahotel ended a five-year contract early. The Expedia deal took almost immediately and lasted from March 2007 to November 2008.

Priceline’s Booking.com is the latest white label partner on the accommodation side for Ryanair, picking up where Expedia left off. The co-branded site has been running for over 12 months.

In contrast to Ryanair’s three hotel distribution partners in four years, rival carrier EasyJet has worked with TUI Travel’s Hotelopia and more recently LateRooms since 2004.

Nevertheless, at the centre of any relationship between Ryanair and a white label provider is the cost structure, whether it is an upfront integration fee or commission-based system.

It is understood the airline prefers the latter method for most of its ancillary relationships.

The obvious attraction to any partner is the lure of huge levels of traffic to the Ryanair site. Each white label provider is also given a channel tab at the top of the site, and some products are promoted during the booking process.

But clearly some of the initially happy marriages fail to get past the first heated row.

Activities and tours specialist Isango made an obviously large PR play about its partnership with Ryanair in early-2008 – it was a big deal for a young company and came around the same time as its rival Viator was winning the attention of EasyJet.

Less known is that the Isango-Ryanair deal ended sharply in the first quarter of 2009, with Isango officials now saying the “commercials did not stack up for us”.

“Better common sense prevailed,” says Deepak Jha, vice president of commercial at Isango.

Ryanair will also not discuss its wider white label agreements or the Isango deal.

There are two basic tenets of Social Media 101 when your brand has been attacked: Be fast in responding and be transparent.

On Monday evening, more than 24 hours after MG Siegler savaged Expedia.com for allegedly botching Siegler’s Valentine’s Day hotel reservation through a waylaid faxed booking and confirmation, Expedia.com — to the best my knowledge — has uttered nothing about the incident on its blog [actually it doesn't have one], on Twitter or Facebook.

On Monday afternoon, Expedia.com did issue a statement to Tnooz and perhaps other press outlets vowing to get to the bottom of the incident.

But, consider Expedia.com’s social media response more than 24 hours after Siegler’s post, which has drawn 158 comments and 489 retweets on TechCrunch alone.

What did the online travel agency, which is running an expensive offline advertising campaign under the theme, “Where you book matters,” tell its more than 24,400 followers about the incident?

Nothing.

Zilch.

In fact, @Expedia, as of this writing on Monday evening, hasn’t tweeted anything since Feb. 12.

OK, it’s Presidents’ Day today, a federal holiday, but attacks on your brand can happen anywhere, anytime and a global brand needs a rapid response team at the ready.

There’s also been no word about the Saturday night booking-gone missing from the much smaller @ExpediaInc account, which hasn’t tweeted anything since Jan. 29.

These days there is a raging debate within the travel industry about social media. Many hotels, airlines, cruise lines, and rental car companies don’t really believe in it, are timid or are just beginning to toy with it. There are more important priorities where the return on investment is more visible, some believe.

Expedia.com, despite having a following to die for, apparently is among those entities yet to really buy into social-media.

Expedia’s Facebook fan page had nothing to say about the “Bloody Valentine” either.

Expedia basically ceded the social-media airwaves to its critics, who have been making the Expedia brand bloody.

Even if Expedia doesn’t know all the facts behind the incident 24 hours later, the online travel agency might have tweeted something like this:

“TechCrunch post is upsetting, we have a team en route to hotel, we’ll make sure if we were wrong this won’t happen again. Stay tuned.”

Meanwhile, let’s do some compare and contrast.

While Expedia.com has avoided any social media commentary of its own, @SouthwestAir was practically tweeting apologies to director Kevin Smith [aka Silent Bob] –who was led off a Southwest jet because of his weight –practically before the staff got him down the aisles.

In fact, this evening, @SouthwestAir posted “My Conversation with Kevin Smith,” and spokeswoman Linda Rutherford acknowledged: “Although I’m not here to debate the decision our Employees made, I can tell you that I for one have learned a lot today. The communication among our Employees was not as sharp as it should have been and, it’s apparent that Southwest could have handled this situation differently. Thanks, Kevin, for your passion around this topic. You were a reasonable guy during our conversation.”

Compare that bit of humanity from Southwest with Expedia’s being missing in action.

In addition to its lack of speed in defending its brand in social media, Expedia.com’s transparency and candor in its press statement appeared, well, challenged.

Expedia’s statement read: “Obviously this is a high-profile case, but the profile doesn’t dictate the response. [my italics]. The details do. I am sure that they are going to do everything possible to try and make things right but can’t offer any particulars right now, since the internal investigation – which is being led at the highest levels – isn’t complete.”

Had the incident not been disclosed in TechCrunch and not received any publicity, would the incident really have triggered an investigation “at the highest levels?”

Incidentally, Siegler lacked a little transparency, as well.

Why did Siegler not disclose the name of the property and the town where the botched booking allegedly took place?

If you are going to detail an alleged crime, you are required to reveal the crime scene.

It’s a basic tenet of Social Media 101.

Expedia is fighting a major social media and PR fire after one of highest profile tech blogs on the planet slammed the agency for poor customer service.

In a highly personal post, MG Siegler, a writer on TechCrunch, took Expedia apart for ruining his Valentine’s Day trip to a hotel with a female companion.

The row has cause such a furore that Expedia officials say that an internal investigation was launched today and is being “led at the highest level”.

Siegler, who also goes by the name Paris Lemon and is one of the site’s more controversial writers, alongside its founder Michael Arrington, says Expedia failed to honour his pre-booked accommodation and he was only notified after arriving at the hotel.

In the 1,800-word article, Siegler explains in detail the series of phone calls he made to an Expedia call centre to attempt to resolve the problem.

He was eventually offered a refund and $100 voucher as compensation. Expedia was unable to find an alternative room in the unnamed city Siegler was in at the time of the incident.

The resulting and somewhat inevitable storm in the comments (140 at the time of writing this post) below the original story included general nods of agreement and recounts of similar experiences.

The article has been retweeted on nearly 500 occasions and is also syndicated to Washingtonpost.com.

Siegler defended his use of TechCrunch to report what was essentially an highly unfortunate yet personal experience:

“I say we have to hold these companies accountable for their crap customer service. It shouldn’t matter if they’re talking to a writer for one of the biggest blogs in the world or anyone else. Expedia routinely fails in customer service, but they get away with it because most of the time people don’t have this type of platform to expose these stories.”

At the centre of the incident is the use of faxes to confirm bookings made via the Expedia website. Siegler says Expedia “apparently” faxed the booking to the hotel in question and received a confirmation in return.

Expedia will not discuss any details of the case until the investigation is complete, officials say, including whether it still uses faxes with hoteliers.

The OTA claims it does not treat complaints differently – like a sliding scale of intervention – based on the ability the customer has to create a public fuss.

However, Expedia says in a statement:

“Obviously this is a high-profile case, but the profile doesn’t dictate the response. The details do. I am sure that they are going to do everything possible to try and make things right but can’t offer any particulars right now, since the internal investigation – which is being led at the highest levels – isn’t complete.

“In this instance, they will quickly work to deduce what happened and why (which is not to imply that the veracity of his complaint is in question) and those details will govern the response and whatever steps are necessary to try and make things right.”

Updates:

• Expedia emails to confirm some hotels still use faxes for booking requests and confirmation. “The hotel’s preference dictates the method Expedia uses. While the majority of hotels rely on the more advanced confirmation systems offered by Expedia, some small properties elect to communicate by fax,” an official says.
• Siegler also replies to an email. He will not name the hotel involved in the incident “just in case the screw up had absolutely nothing to do with them”, but confirms it was located in Carmel, CA. ”As far as I know, Expedia hasn’t contacted me or Michael since the incident. I might put them on hold for an hour if they do,” he adds.

A pundit has the right to cast a critical eye over a business, even if the founders are proven entrepreneurial billionaires.

Robert Diener of Getaroom.com should need no introduction to readers of a blog about the online travel industry.

In 2002, the parts of Hotel Reservation Network/Hotels.com that IAC did not already own were bought and merged with Expedia.

The deal set Diener and his partners up for life and made Expedia the then biggest force in online hotels in the world.

A title – despite the challenges of Booking.com/Priceline, Orbitz and Travelocity – they still hold.

In July 2009 (was there a seven-year non-compete?), Diener announced the launch of Getaroom.com (a pre-Tnooz Dennis Schaal said this about the announcement).

Given the pedigree it was inevitable they would receive a lot of media attention.

On PhoCusWright’s Center Stage in Orlando, Diener was interviewed by Carol Rheem of PCW giving the blog and tweetpit a chance to discuss and critique the GetARoom model.

The business is a twist on opaque pricing and a reversal of the Priceline and Hotwire models.

A consumer looks up a hotel on the getaroom website where prices are clearly displayed.

Then the consumer calls the GetARoom call centre to purchase the room. GetARoom will sell the customer the room over the phone at a price less than the one displayed on the site but will not tell the consumer what the price is (and therefore what the discount is) until after the customer’s card has been charged.

With Hotwire and Priceline you don’t know the hotel’s identity until after your card has been charged. With GetARoom you know the hotel at the time the card is charged but not the price.

For this to work three things have to happen: consumers have to pick up the phone; consumers have to be prepared to give their credit card even though the final price is not known; and hotels have to be prepared to give opaque cheaper rates based on a phone call as a gate.

Let me take you through each of these and tell you why these three elements will happen at a scale insufficient to make this work:

1. Consumers have to pick up the phone: consumers have abandoned the phone for simple transactions such as hotel bookings and point to point air. Especially in the US. It is instant gratification, no-talk booking that is and has driven the online revolution. Driving people back to the phone for a straight out hotel booking seems counter to the rest of the online travel revolution.
2. Consumers have to agree to charges without knowing price: the obvious analysis here is that consumers are going to be reluctant to do anything when price and potentially room type is unknown. Arguing against myself, I could say that credit card hesitation was the largest anti-online travel argument back in the old days and the industry and consumer found a way around that. But in this case it is more than just typical security related consumer CC hesitation. Getaroom is asking consumers to gamble with price. Consumers need significant rewards – beyond the odds rewards – to gamble on price. The less obvious analysis is around credit card charging rules and chargebacks. A chargeback is where a consumer denies a charge levied against their card. The online travel industry has to deal with the challenge of consumers denying charges for transactions without signatures or PIN/code based confirmation. Mastercard Chargeback reason code number 4808 states that a charge can be challenged if…”the transaction was non–face-to-face and was not authorized.”. (manual here).  I can imagine an easy path for a potential customer successfully securing a chargeback by saying “they did not tell me the price. I did not know what the charge was going to be”.
3. Hotels have to be prepared to give opaque cheaper rates based on a phone call as a gate: hotels give deep discounts when they can protect the rates for unfettered booking and thus threatening regular rates. Scores of examples of this – package rates, secret hotels, closed user groups like travel clubs or loyalty groups, group rates and more. Critical to the hotels giving the discounts is a comfort level that the discounted rates are sufficiently hidden from general public access to protect the standard rates. Having to make a phone call does not seem to be a sufficient gate or level of protection to encourage a scale number of hotels to offer discounts. This is especially true for chain hotels. Chains are the number one participators in closed groups precisely because they can product their other pricing channels. If I am right here then either GetARoom ends up with only a limited number of hotels offering discounts or they have to provide discounts by cutting their margins. The first (limited number of hotels) is a bad customer experience. The second (cutting margin) risks hotel anger for breaking Best Rate Guarantee requirement and limiting scope for marketing and technology investment.

But – while there are three reasons why I don’t think Getaroom will work – there is one big reason why it will work.

Last time Diener and team tried to facilitate hotel bookings, they built a company and they sold it for billions.

Appendage:

I need to clarify my comments in point 2 above. The first time I called the getaroom call centre and tried to book a hotel with an unpublished rate I thought that I had to make my credit card available to be charged before knowing the price.  After this post went live a comment was sent to me that said that it  was possible to pull out of the transaction after the price was disclosed and before the card had been changed.  So I called the getaroom call centre again.  In that subsequent call to getaroom it was true that I was able to pull out of the transaction after being told the price.  But it is not a simple “they tell you the price and I say yes or no” sale.   The call centre agent said she would only tell me the unpublished rate (assuming their was one) if she thought I was ‘willing to do the transaction’.  This means she would asses my willingness to transact, take my cc and reservation details, tell me the price and (once I confirm) charge the card.  She made it clear that while I could pull out once she told me the unpublished rate, that she would only tell me the unpublished rate if she was satisfied that I was “willing to complete the transaction”. She would not be any clearer on how to she assessed this willingness – though it became clear that by asking so many questions on whether or not I could pull out that she was putting me in the unwilling basket.

Disclosure: See Hughes’s Tnooz profile – contributor in a personal capacity, views are not representative of Orbitz Worldwide.

On the heels of Travelport’s aborted IPO, Expedia Inc. President and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says there are no plans to spin out TripAdvisor into a public company.

Khosrowshahi, who declined to speculate about Travelport’s decision,  said Expedia will continue to be “opportunistic” about TripAdvisor’s status, but “as long as TripAdvisor is executing well, it will remain inside the company.” A financial analyst had asked Khosrowshahi about TripAdvisor’s IPO prospects during Expedia Inc.’s fourth quarter earnings-conference call today.

In playing down the idea of a TripAdvisor IPO, Khosrowshahi says one of the standard justifications for pursuing an IPO is if a business unit is suffering as part of a larger company. And, he says this is certainly not the case with TripAdvisor, which enjoys in-house advertising from the likes of Expedia.com, Hotwire and hotels.com.

And, he believes Expedia’s advertising and media business — as practised on Expedia’s transaction sites as well as on TripAdvisor — is a key differentiator between Expedia and its competitors.

In 2009, Expedia’s advertising and media revenue increased 10% to $311 million, and it accounted for 11% of global revenue.

And 11% of revenue is a lot when you consider that the media business is a high-margin business. In other words, 11% in media revenue translates into a much higher percentage of profit.

Actually, in 2009, Expedia’s transaction websites — including Expedia.com, Hotwire and hotels.com — generated a 21% increase in advertising revenue and the TripAdvisor Media Network — including TripAdvisor, BookingBuddy, CruiseCritic, HolidayWatchdog, SeatGuru and others –contributed a 6% advertising-revenue increase.

Khosrowshahi says Expedia’s advertising and media business acts as a hedge against an expected tougher advertising environment in 2010 when Expedia will have to go out and spend search-engine marketing dollars.

Another benefit of keeping TripAdvisor in-house, Khosrowshahi tells analysts, is that TripAdvisor President and CEO Stephen Kaufer and his management team doesn’t have to be “distracted by calls like this.”

As long as TripAdvisor continues to “execute, it is fine where it is,” Khosrowshahi says.

For the fourth quarter, Expedia Inc. posted a profit of $102.2 million on revenue of $697.5 million, a 12% increase. In the fourth quarter of 2008, Expedia Inc. lost $2.75 billion, largely because of a $3 billion impairment charge.

In Expedia’s hotel business, the company grew its global room nights 23% to 69.7 million in 2009, picking up marketshare.

Khosrowshahi says it’s difficult to pinpoint where Expedia’s hotel marketshare gains are coming from, especially since Priceline and Orbitz Worldwide haven’t reported their fourth quarter numbers yet.

He believes the marketshare gains are coming primarily from offline agencies, but some of it could be coming from OTAs, as well.

In the competition with Booking.com in Europe, Khosrowshahi says Expedia Inc. added 9,000 agency-model hotels in Europe in 2009, bringing the total to around 16,000, and expects to add around another 9,000-10,000 in 2010.

With Venere in the fold, 2009 was all about getting infrastructure and inventory in place, and in 2010 Expedia is confident it will start driving demand for hotels through tactics such as search engine optimization and search-engine marketing, Khosrowshahi says.

Khosrowshahi says Spain, where Expedia’s hotel penetration has been a bit low, and eastern Europe, present substantial growth opportunities for the company’s hotel business.

Travel metasearch once was lean, mean and hungry, but now it seems that websites like Fly.com and Kayak may be getting a bit wimpy, and might be forsaking consumers’ needs in deference to the sensitivities of online travel agencies and airlines.

In the early days of travel metasearch, consumers could use metasearch websites to compare prices of flights and hotel rooms, and in the search-results grids you’d find flight ticket and room prices from various airlines and intermediaries lined-up side by side.

Ah, those were the days, a seemingly bygone era.

Look what’s happening now.

The following is a Fly.com results’ display for a Newark-Fort Lauderdale flight on US Airways.

While consumers can readily see that they can book the US Airways flight on Travelocity for $403, the Hotwire price is a blank — and a mystery.

To see if Hotwire — a discount travel website — beats Travelocity on price, you’d have to click on the Hotwire link and navigate to Hotwire.com, where you’d see the following display.

Hotwire is offering a bunch of US Airways flights for Newark-Fort Lauderdale for $402.80 — and that may be the issue. Hotwire — which declined to comment for this story — probably doesn’t want to see its prices displayed next to Travelocity — or other competitors — over and over on metasearch websites because Hotwire isn’t offering travelers any kind of a deal in some instances.

This sort of prices-gone-missing approach apparently is becoming more common on metasearch websites as players like Fly.com and Kayak give in to the brand sensitivities of online travel agencies and airlines.

In so doing, the metasearch websites may be doing a disservice to consumers, many of whom certainly want to view the price of a flight or car rental without having to click over to another website.

I am sure the travel-metasearch engines would love to do right by consumers and display as much pricing as possible, but they are letting the OTAs, in these cases, conduct their merchandising efforts in ways that may not be in the best interests of consumers.

Expedia.com, a sister company of Hotwire’s in the Expedia Inc. portfolio, is taking a somewhat similar tack in Kayak’s hotel displays.

Look at the following display for InterContinental — The Barclay hotel in Manhattan and notice that Kayak displays no price comparisons — other than a generic $237 price — or booking options in the initial display.

From here, the consumer is still two steps away from beginning the process of booking The Barclay. The consumer has to click on the details link to view the following options on Kayak.com. (Incidentally, only Booking.com comes close to the $237 base room price that Kayak listed on the previous screen.)

Here, consumers finally can view room pricing from the various booking websites — except for Expedia’s. Kayak doesn’t display Expedia’s rates, and if consumers want to view them, they’ll have to select “click to see rates” and navigate to Expedia.com.

Kayak’s stated mantra is to making the user experience as easy as possible, but by allowing Expedia to display “click to see rates” instead of The Barclay’s room rate, Kayak and Expedia are making the consumer experience clunkier.

On a side note, one positive aspect of the above Kayak display is that it enables Orbitz to list its phone number for consumers who’d rather call then click on the website link. That’s great for consumer choice and for Orbitz’s merchandising efforts.

Online travel agencies like Hotwire and Expedia.com aren’t the only source websites which are throwing their weight around in metasearch.

Several airlines have followed American Airlines’ lead and are refusing to display their fares in metasearch results alongside the ticket prices of other airlines.

Both trends — OTAs refusing to disclose ticket prices or hotel room rates, as well as airlines refusing to submit their fares for side-by-side comparisons — are making the complex trip-planning process even more complex for consumers.

TripAdvisor launched its flight metasearch engine almost a year ago to the day in the US, triggering much chattering in the industry as to whether it could successfully integrate it into its existing product.

A UK version was finally launched in October 2009 in what was a frenetic period for US-based engines with Travelzoo’s Fly.com also unveiling its version for the Brits almost simultaneously.

Officials refuse to give away any hard data concerning the product, only to say they are “very happy” with progress so far and add that 2010 will be “strong” overall for TripAdvisor Flights.

“Millions of travelers in the U.S use our award winning meta search product, and our monthly search volumes continue to increase.”

One area that might surprise many is that the international rollout of the flight engine has been limited so far to the US and the UK.

Although some argue launching international versions of complex products such as metasearch engines is notoriously difficult, officials at the UK’s Skyscanner have quietly been launching international versions at a rapid rate in recent years.

Once again, TripAdvisor is tight-lipped about where it might unleash flight meta next across its portfolio of country sites, saying that for the time being its “classic” version – directing visitors to partner sites for results – remains in places such as France and Germany.

When the product was originally unveiled, officials admitted they had been working on it for around a year and said it was probably the most significant launch since the review service appeared in the early 2000s.

A string of features have been added since February 2009, officials say, including AirWatch alerts and a Fees Estimator tool.

The product’s success, however, will be measured in the long-term by how much it has impacted on those elsewhere in the marketplace.

Many believed having the user review system to piggyback on would give TripAdvisor a strong advantage over the likes of Kayak in international markets (a similar situation to Fly.com and its ability to buddy up with Travelzoo).

UPDATE: Within two hours of this post appearing, TripAdvisor curiously pulled both of the video clips from YouTube. The clips also featured in the company’s own YouTube channel.

TripAdvisor says it “found out” the video was on YouTube and took it down. The clip wasn’t ready yet and hadn’t gone through the full vetting process, a spokesman says. Amazingly a production person in TripAdvisor had posted in prematurely.

TripAdvisor is either on a recruitment drive or has turned into one of those companies that likes to create quirky and edgy videos to show off how, err, quirky and edgy it is.

Or both.

The human resources video from the folk at TripAdvisor was uploaded to YouTube this week and paints a heartwarmingly upbeat picture of life at work for the user review giant and its string of subsidiaries.

The five-minute clip (thankfully there is also 30-second version) features all manner of staffers from chief executive Stephen Kaufer and advertising boss Robin Ingle to business development director Nathan Clapton and a whole host of engineers and marketing people.

No sign of the Snarky Owl.