A new TripAdvisor subsidiary stealthily is working to launch a new private sale offering of four- and five-star hotels.

The new Expedia Inc. operating company, working under the project name RICO because details weren’t public, would be part of Smarter Travel Media [including BookingBuddy, SmarterTravel, SeatGuru, Airfarewatchdog and FrequentFlier.com], which in turn is part of the TripAdvisor Media Network.

Plans may be subject to change and there are a lot of lingering questions about the under-the-radar initiative since nothing has been officially announced about project RICO, which likely won’t be the ultimate name of the company.

But SmarterTravel Media is outlining the following details to prospective hotel partners.

The new website, slated for a soft launch in late August or early September, would offer four- and five-star hotels only and give them the ability to offer their properties exclusively — at least by region — for up to seven days to qualfied members.

Initial plans call for RICO to target high-income individuals, particularly affluent women 35-55 years old.

The target RICO consumer-member, who supposedly can join by invitation-only, is a “selective, brand-conscious shopper who loves to brag about the rare find she’s scored” and is “always aware of the trends but doesn’t necessarily follow them,” according to sales materials.

Hotels signing up for this Smarter Travel Media private sale offering would offer net rates, have no up-front costs and do not need to sign long-term contracts.

As is standard with the merchant model, consumer hotel bookings would be nonrefundable.

The hotel can control the room type and blackout dates, and reservations are handled via Excel spreadsheets, with no extranets or rate codes required.

Karen Kirsten, a spokeswoman for Smarter Travel Media, wouldn’t discuss project RICO or confirm its existence, saying the company never discusses new products before they are launched.

“As a leader in travel deals business, deals are our sweet spot and we will continue to evolve and grow our products,” Kirsten says.

Smarter Travel Media’s entry into private sales coincides with the travel industry’s new flirtation with this trend, as evidenced by the relatively recent launches of JetSetter, Kayak Private Sale, RueLaLa.com, Vacationist and Tablet Private Sale, to name just a few companies in the segment.

RICO would be a departure for Smarter Travel Media, which until now focused exclusively on the advertising and media business and not merchant-model hotel transactions.

It’s unclear whether RICO would handle the transactions itself or outsource them to a third-party company, as Kayak did with its private sale effort.

It also remains to be seen why Expedia Inc. decided to add a new operating company for the RICO effort instead of having Expedia.com, SmarterTravel or another existing subsidiary merely introduce a new private sale product to its portfolio.

There are a number of theories on the new subsidiary angle, ranging from speculation about the possibility of TripAdvisor having acquired an as-yet undisclosed company to kick-start project RICO to the advantages of focus that a separate operating unit would bring.

So, what do competitors think of the fact that TripAdvisor President and CEO Stephen Kaufer now would have a private-sale transaction site to round out TripAdvisor’s advertising and metasearch businesses?

Says one competitor: “It’s great to see validation of the category. Everyone likes this space.”

Chinese travelers are increasingly booking online and eLong and Ctrip are battling for their hearts, minds and Renminbi.

eLong, a subsidiary of Expedia Inc., indicated when it released its second quarter results last week that its percentage of online bookings is increasing, with more than one-third now taking place online.

eLong CEO Guanfu Cui says the company’s percentage of online bookings has been growing over the last several quarters and “the online growth is a lot faster than the offline.”

Meanwhile, Ctrip, which has an estimated 75% online marketshare in China, says around 35% of its bookings occurred online in the second quarter.

Thus, with both Ctrip and eLong taking more than one-third of their transactions online, the two dominant online travel intermediaries in China are growing their higher-margin online bookings and are outpacing the electronic booking share for the overall $61 billion travel market in China. In PhoCusWright’s Emerging Online Travel Marketplace in China, published in November 2009, the research outfit projected that 17% of all travel revenue in China would be booked online in 2010.

Over the next few years, of course, as Ctrip and its smaller rival, eLong, duke it out for online customers, they’ll compete with airline websites and metasearch players, as well.

In detailing some of eLong’s online strides, Cui says the company’s online hotel bookings more than doubled in the second quarter of 2010 compared with the year-earlier period.

For the quarter, eLong’s net income was flat at RMB9.4 million, although net revenue increased 45% to RMB118.9 million. Cui attributed eLong’s performance to the push to drive online growth, strong demand in China and the Shanghai World Expo.

Because of its Expedia relationship, eLong accesses inventory from 120,000 hotels worldwide and claims to be “the largest online distributor in China in terms of hotels offered which can be directly booked.”

eLong attributes its online growth spurt to a website upgrade that brought faster loading times and better availability; online marketing, and an eCoupon promotion that offers discounts on hotel bookings in conjunction with the Shanghai World Expo.

In another electronic thrust, eLong says by the end of 2010, it hopes to eradicate cash transactions as it focuses on credit card- and online- banking customers.

And, like Ctrip, eLong is trumpeting its mobile booking capabilities.

Cui says growth from eLong’s mobile website, which launched in the second quarter, “is very nice, but the base is very small.” He adds that customers use the mobile site more for hotel bookings than for flights because hotel-bookers don’t need to provide credit cards and save a step in the process.

eLong will continue to upgrade its mobile booking platform and will focus on ensuring that its hotel offering remains competitive, Cui says.

Cui cautions that booking platforms are important, “but the core competency is about your product competitiveness and the experience of overall booking.”

Australia metasearch site HotelsCombined overhauled its website and added a mobile site, as well.

Among the changes, the website added links to guest reviews from the customers of Priceline, Booking.com, hotels.com and Travelocity, and added a popularity ranking.

Like many players, ranging from Google to Orbitz and ebookers, HotelsCombined reworked the website to give much more prominence to maps with hotel information.

Here’s how the prior website looked:

And, here’s a look at the redesign:

User-generated content — from online travel agency customers who stayed at the properties — was a key focus of the changes.

“The reviews product got more than just a cosmetic change,” says business development director Vicki Byrne, adding that the company sought to resolve the issues of trust and the sheer volume of reviews.

“Our product solves these two issues by analyzing reviews only from trusted sources, where users’ stays at the hotel has been verified, and summarizing most-discussed points about the hotel into an easy digest form.”

Among other changes in the redesign, HotelsCombined dropped some hotels’ phone numbers while retaining the phone numbers of others.

Byrne says HotelsCombined is experimenting with phone number listings.

“The phone reservation option is an experimental development,” Byrne says. “It’s currently still running on selected hotels for a limited set of geographies. We definitely see value to the user and commercial potential in markets like China, for example.”

However, even within specific markets, some hotels have their phone numbers listed and some don’t.

HotelsCombined also has been adding links to hotels’ homepages based on commercial relationships with the properties or chains.

“Our aim is to offer comparison of all important sources of hotel pricing and information and that is why we continue to expand our relationship with hotel chains and individual hotels,” Byrne says.

In addition to these changes, HotelsCombined quietly rolled out a mobile website, which follows its release of an iPhone app, iFind Hotels, in early July.

The Orbitz hotel shopping path just became a little metasearch-like.

Orbitz added a bunch of tools — Google Maps with real-time room rates, and filters and sliders based on star ratings, reviewer scores, amenities and hotel chains – which enable consumers to view the initial search results and then to do comparison shopping for other hotels.

The tools resemble some you’d find on a metasearch website and represent a twist for an online travel agency.

In fact, Orbitz says it “is the first major online travel website to enable detailed side-by-side property comparison upfront on the initial hotel search results page.”

The big difference, however, is that consumers will be doing all of their comparison shopping on Orbitz and not, as with metasearch, on a variety of supplier websites.

So, when you search for hotels in Cleveland, Ohio, Orbitz serves up its traditional display of search results, but then in the left navigation pane, you’ll find Google Maps with hotel pricing and all of the sliders and filtering tools. It looks like this:

When enlarged, the map offers satellite and terrain views.

In the Cleveland hotel search example, if you don’t like the initial search results or want to comparison shop, one way of doing so would be to click on $89 on the Google Map, and you will see a box with information about the Country Inn & Suites by Carlson Davenport. Here it is:

Notice that you see the base room rate, the total price including “taxes and fees,” the reviewer score, links to more hotel details and a Google Street View of the property. When you click the Select button, you begin the booking process for that property.

The introduction of comparison shopping tools in initial hotel search results represents another leading move for Orbitz in its hotel search experience.

Orbitz was the first online travel agency in the U.S. to introduce Hotel TotalPrice in initial hotel search results, and to offer Hotel Price Assurance.

The jury is out, however, on what these series of new tools will mean for the Orbitz hotel business and whether they will translate into concrete gains.

Orbitz Worldwide posted a profit in the second quarter and its gross bookings rose 21%, but like Expedia Inc., Orbitz didn’t keep pace with Priceline in growth of hotel room nights booked.

For Orbitz, hotel room nights stayed is a key metric because the company has established growing its hotel business as the number one priority.

In the second quarter, Priceline’s room nights increased 48.2% to 23.2 million, Expedia’s lagged with a 12% jump to 20.3 million, and Orbitz came in third among the publicly reporting online travel agencies with a modest 9% increase in hotel room nights.

Starting from a lower base than hotel-market leader Priceline and Expedia, Orbitz discloses the percentage gain or loss in hotel room nights, but doesn’t specify the number of room nights.

Still, there were bright spots on the hotel front for Orbitz Worldwide.

Its ebookers unit saw room nights increase 58% compared with the second quarter of 2009.

Orbitz Worldwide’s hotel net revenue increased 13% to $52.1 million, and that includes an increase in net revenue for its U.S. hotel business because of a hike in the number of standalone hotel transactions, the company says.

However, net revenue at Orbitz’s Australia-based HotelClub business declined because of lower volumes in Europe and shift toward bookings in markets where margins are lower. Ash cloud disruptions may have contributed to some softness in Europe.

Overall for Orbitz Worldwide In the second quarter, its net income decreased 5% to $9.7 million on revenue of $193.5 million, a 3% increase.

Orbtiz Worldwide’s global gross bookings increased 17% to more than $3 billion, primarily because of higher airfares and increased transaction volumes.

That, too, highlights Orbitz Worldwide’s ongoing reliance on air as it continues its heavy-lifting to build its hotel business.

Enter TravelJigsaw.

Priceline acquired a majority stake in Manchester, U.K.,-based TravelJigsaw May 18 and in the remaining six weeks of the second quarter, the European and North American car rental service contributed $43.9 million in gross travel bookings to Priceline’s top line.

Speaking during Priceline’s second quarter earnings call Aug. 3, President and CEO Jeffery Boyd said the company intends to turn TravelJigsaw into a global brand and will give it a “fair degree” of operational independence, as the parent company does with Booking.com and Agoda.

Priceline may look in the future to running TravelJigsaw advertisements on other Priceline websites, but the goal is for the car rental site to build its own brand and customer base, he said.

TravelJigsaw’ contribution to Priceline is minor, for now, and would be slightly accretive to earnings for the rest of the year, officials said.

Priceline did $3.4 billion in gross travel bookings in the second quarter, with U.S. gross bookings up 19.6%, and international gross bookings climbing 67.1%, on a local currency basis.

Priceline said the second quarter was another one characterized by gains in hotel market share, with 23.2 million room nights sold, an increase of 48.2%.

“We are pleased with the hotel transaction growth we are seeing worldwide, which we believe is being driven by geographic expansion, solid execution in promoting improved conversion on our websites and benefits of group-wide cooperation on integration initiatives,” Boyd stated. “These factors, combined with growing Internet commerce and travel in some of our newer markets, resulted in resilience in the face of economic volatility and periodic travel disruptions, and we believe provide a foundation for growth over the long-term.”

That rise in hotel room nights actually was a deceleration from the first quarter, largely due to the ash cloud and political disruptions in Thailand, a key Agoda market, officials said.

Overall, Priceline;\’s  net income rose 71% to $114.6 million on revenue of $767.4 million, a 27.1% increase compared with the year-earlier period.

Turning to other issues of the day during a question and answer session, Boyd was asked about several potential threats — the Google-ITA Software deal, the increased importance of Travelocity and Expedia as opaque-inventory vendors, and possible inroads by competitors in the mobile channel.

Boyd said Priceline takes Google at its word that its intent with the ITA Software deal is to improve the customer experience in travel search and to deliver more qualified leads to advertisers.

“If that’s how things shake out, it could be a win for Google and the online travel agencies,” Boyd said.

However, he added that the Google-ITA deal could become a competitive threat “over time.”

Boyd doesn’t see any big impact from Travelocity’s Top Secret Hotels or Expedia’s introduction of Expedia Unpublished Rate hotels at this juncture, but they, too, like ITA-Google, could turn into a “concern for the future,” Boyd said.

The Priceline CEO said he’s pleased with the company’s efforts in mobile apps, with their focus on last-minute hotels and cars, and noted that it’s important for Priceline to hold its own in mobile because companies can steal share by becoming dominant in an emerging channel.

The proposed New York State budget would levy a higher occupancy tax rate on online travel agency websites than hotel websites.

The budget legislation would increase the occupancy tax on intermediary sales 20%, which would mean that guests booking a New York City hotel room through Expedia, Travelocity or tour operator websites, for instance, would see the occupancy tax rise to 7.05%, from 5.875%, according to the In Transit blog.

The potential higher tax would be on the net rate that the OTAs get from hotels and the OTAs’ service fees, a move vehemently opposed by the Interactive Travel Services Association, which represents the OTAs on hotel tax issues.

When taking OTAs’ service fees into account, the legislation, if adopted, could make hotel websites an even cheaper option for hotel bookings than OTA websites.

The Business Travel Coalition and the American Society of Travel Agents are aligned with ITSA on the issue.

“This should be called the New Jersey and Connecticut Tourism Promotion Act,” said Art Sackler, ITSA’s executive director. “It will create an entirely new tax on nearly every participant in the travel value chain — a tax that will create massive red tape, increase paperwork, damage the state’s critical tourism industry, raise hotel prices, reduce the number of visitors, and worsen the impact of the current slump.  Let’s not step over dollars to try to collect a few pennies.”

Some hoteliers, however, may view the move as leveling the playing field since they charge consumers occupancy taxes on the full retail rate.

Yapta turned to Priceline’s Booking.com to plug holes in hotel-search data from Orbitz, particularly in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Yapta was slated to integrate Booking.com into the Yapta website this morning.

Previously, when users searched for hotels on Yapta, they could book the properties through Orbitz and Yapta’s hotel-rate tracking service used Orbitz room-rate data to monitor rate drops. For example, the following Yapta search used Orbitz data:

With the integration of Booking.com, hotel-rate searches will still default to Orbitz, but Booking.com data will kick in if the property is not within Orbitz’s database.

“For example, if a traveler wants to track pricing on a particular hotel in Prague, and Orbitz doesn’t have that particular hotel property in its inventory, then Yapta will serve hotel inventory from Booking.com that fits that query or request,” says Yapta spokesman Jeff Pecor.

Orbitz Worldwide and Priceline, which owns Booking.com, are competitors, which each trying to build its global hotel business. Booking.com has outpaced Orbitz and other rivals in its efforts.

With both Orbitz and Booking.com in the fold, Yapta says travelers can track room rates on more than 196,000 properties around the world and can sign up for email alerts when the rates decrease.

Yapta launched its room-rate monitoring service in March 2009 and says it has notified travelers about more than $350 million in potential savings.

Hoteliers got a lot of positive news in Pegasus Solutions’ June average daily rate numbers.

Business travelers likely will not be as enthusiastic.

That’s because Pegasus says in June ADRs in largely corporate GDS bookings climbed 6.3% globally compared with June 2009.

And, hotel bookings outside North America through GDSs in June notched their highest monthly ADR increase, 7.5%, so far this year, Pegasus says.

Hotel booking transactions and revenue through the GDS channel in June climbed 23.5% and 36%, respectively, Pegasus says.

Those numbers show that business travel is coming back.

Things were a bit different for hotels in the online leisure channel, where bookings and revenue grew — but at slower clips than in the corporate channel.

Bookings and revenue rose through the online leisure channel 6.3% and 5.3%, respectively, but ADRs were down 0.9% in June, Pegasus says.

Pegasus characterizes the ADRs in the online leisure channel as “stable.”

In fact, so far in 2010, ADRs in the online leisure travel have decreased 2.4% while they have increased in the corporate GDS channel about 4.8% since January.

“As reported industry-wide, larger corporate markets are gaining strength while leisure markets overall are finding it more difficult to maintain momentum,” Pegasus says in the July edition [June data] of The Pegasus View [pdf].  ”Still high unemployment rates, for one, keep consumer spending in check, particularly for the non-luxury market segments. That being said, in general people are traveling and more are continuing to do so at levels greater than last year, and in some cases greater than the last three years.”

So, in general the trends show that the hotel market is recovering, that properties are increasing their corporate rates and that the discounting frenzy online remains at about the same levels as last year — or perhaps a tad steeper.

This means consumers can still find some good hotel deals online and there is still softness for hotels in the leisure market.

“This month, however, we’re most pleased to see evidence that hotels are harnessing the value of strategic pricing,” states Mike Kistner, the Pegasus CEO. “The end of the rate nosedive, especially in the leisure sector, and as evidenced by Marriott’s recent announcement to boost corporate rates, shows hoteliers are capitalizing on their worth, which will be imperative to a full recovery.”

Pegasus gathers its data from nearly 100,000 hotel customers worldwide. The company says the data include billions of transactions.

It’s tough starting a travel website. But, what about launching 11,700 English-language online travel websites, plus sub-domains in Spanish and Chinese?

Swiftrank, a Singapore-headquartered company with offices in the U.S. and U.K., says it launched 11,700 online travel websites, including Luxury Tampa Hotels,  Five Star New York Hotels and Best Restaurants Manhattan, for examples, for hotels and other suppliers seeking incremental distribution, with a focus on consumers who search by destination rather than by brand.

In the works for around three years, Swiftrank can pull off such a yeoman task in part because of its “evolved content management system,” says Sue Heilbronner, chief marketing officer of Swiftrank global and president of Swiftrank North America.

For now, the focus is on U.S. hotels, Heilbronner says, with each website featuring about 20 properties. Today, consumers can book the hotels through an affiliate relationship with Booking.com.

But, Swiftrank plans on establishing direct connects with hotels in major markets, where the bookings would take place on the hotels’ websites, Heilbronner says.

So, tons of hotel websites already exist. How would Swiftrank differentiate its network?

Heilbronner answers that Swiftrank will be on the side of the supplier, enabling them to attract incremental direct connect bookings.

Hotels would be offered a cost-per-click program, although Swiftrank is in discussions with one large chain about establishing a standard commission model, she says.

Swiftrank also is mulling a flat-rate advertising fee for a set period, such as six months, Heilbronner says.

In addition to hotels, Swiftrank offers premium placements to car rental firms, casinos and spas.

The company says: “Swiftrank’s website management and distribution are supported by industry-leading SEO expertise, and the company’s travel partners will enjoy the returns associated with the trend toward search engines featuring websites that provide genuine choice to the users.”

Heilbronner says Swiftrank, which has the subdomains in Spanish and Chinese, is working on localized translations of its websites.

Well, Swiftrank may have a lot of travel websites, but it obviously isn’t the “largest global travel online travel network” using any other substantive metric.