Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Expedia Inc. (Photo provided to China Daily)
Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Expedia Inc, said he didn't know how much he would love it, when he first joined the company 11 year ago.
Under his leadership, the global leader in the online travel industry has grown to more than 18,000 employees with $6.6 billion in annual revenue. In addition to Expedia.com, its brands include Orbitz, Travelocity, Trivago, Hotels.com, Hotwire and many others.
In China, Expedia ended its 10-and-a-half year relationship with eLong on May 22, 2015, by selling its 62.4 percent stake in the company to investors, including Ctrip. Khosrowshahi said the eLong sale did not mean Expedia was giving up on the battle to succeed in China's market. Rather, it was just a shift in strategy.
Expedia and Ctrip have agreed to cooperate with each other to allow their respective customers to benefit from certain travel product offerings. It also recently launched a China-specific Expedia website in the mainland (www.expedia.cn). Both are efforts by Expedia to tap the Chinese outward bound market through aggressive investments and partnerships.
"We sell the best product in the world so it is so easy to be passionate about it." he said. "I love the product, I love technology and I love the company's global nature. I'm as excited as I could be.
Khosrowshahi recently spoke with China Daily about his China strategy, leadership and personal life. The following are edited excerpts of that interview.
How do you see China's online travel business and the future of the market?
If you talk about China and online, you have to talk about mobile. How quickly it has gone mobile; how quickly it has gone to the app. For us, the particular focus in China is going to be on China outbound. We have a partnership with Ctrip on the package side. We want to use our inventory of more than 300,000 hotels worldwide and make it available either on agency or package rates, and pipe it to all of our Chinese local partners to really make that inventory available to Chinese consumers who are looking to travel all over the world.
What's the biggest difference between the China market and the U.S. market? What are the challenges in the China market?
I think the China market has been much more competitive on the discounting front because the it has been growing so fast. China is behind the U.S. as far as consolidation goes. The destructive price wars between Didi and Uber drove consolidation. That is something that China is right in the middle of now, but which has already happened in the U.S.. That is one significant difference. Another significant difference is that China is ahead of the U.S. with mobile penetration and especially app penetration. And the structure of the Chinese apps, which are fully packaged, is a very different architecture from U.S. apps that tend to be for single use. The challenge for Western companies is to be relevant to local Chinese consumers, who are very savvy, understand a lot about service, are very demanding and want the service the way they want it. So we do think that to address China, we have to do it not only with a great product, but also though partnership. And we are committed to both.
