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According to Expedia, Choice is an outlier

November 03, 2009 | Hospitality Industry

While Expedia executives have been tight-lipped about the company’s decision to take most Choice Hotels properties off of its Expedia.com and Hotels.com sites, president and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and CFO Michael Adler had to address it during the company’s earnings conference last week.

During the 52-minute conference call, Khosrowshahi was asked by JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan to give some color on the situation with Choice and a potential similar situation with Best Western International.

Khosrowshahi’s response: “As far as the discussions we have had with Choice, we’re not doing business with Choice right now on a chain basis. We don’t have the vast majority of Choice hotels on our site. I don’t want to get into the particulars of, let’s say, negotiations and discussions we have had for Choice other than to say, first of all, our primary goal is to have the broadest, deepest set and highest-quality set of inventory for the benefit of our customers.

“And this doesn’t signal any kind of a change in our overall philosophy as far as how we work with our hotel partners and what we’re looking at. It’s not really an issue of economics. It’s more an issue of our wanting rate parity and inventory parity for our customers. When our customers come to Expedia, we want them to know that they’re getting the best prices and certainly we’re insistent on that. To the extent that Choice doesn’t want to work under those terms, we won’t be doing business with each other. Those are terms that we work with, with our other strategic partners. They’re comfortable with it. We’re comfortable with it. So it’s nothing unusual from what I would say is typical practice for us in most of our other OTA competitors, so to speak.

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