Staff Reporter |
Editor | Wen Shuqi
This week, legacy online travel giant Expedia dropped its second-quarter earnings report. For Q2 2026, total bookings climbed 12%, revenue rose 14%, and adjusted EBITDA jumped 23% to hit $1.1 billion. Meanwhile, room nights booked grew 6% during the same period.
For everyday Chinese consumers, this company might feel like a distant memory. Back in 2015, Expedia sold off its controlling stake in eLong—the online travel platform it had backed for over a decade—effectively ending its direct participation in China’s cutthroat OTA market. At the time, the domestic OTA scene was in full-blown warfare, with eLong squeezed by homegrown heavyweights like Ctrip and Qunar. Even after that deal, Expedia kept the collaboration going with both eLong and Ctrip on outbound travel services.
But here’s the thing: Expedia’s ties to the Chinese market remain far tighter than most people realize. And in recent years, the company’s most important growth engine beyond the consumer segment—its B2B business—has been pushing Expedia to keep digging deeper into China.
One standout in the earnings report: Expedia’s B2B arm has now posted double-digit growth for 20 consecutive quarters. In Q2, total bookings were up 12%, but B2B bookings surged 21%. The company credits much of its 14% revenue growth to this segment, which alone grew 23%.
So what exactly does Expedia’s B2B business do? It provides travel tech services to airlines, travel agencies, and corporate travel management companies. These partners tap into Expedia’s massive inventory of hotels, flights, and vacation packages, plus its tech infrastructure, to power their own travel booking offerings for end users.
In China, Expedia’s partners aren’t just OTA platforms like Ctrip—they also include local travel agencies, hotel groups, and airlines. For instance, back in 2020, Expedia rolled out an incentive program across nine countries and regions, including China, specifically designed to boost collaboration with smaller and mid-sized travel agencies on the ground.
For overseas OTA players, trying to win over Chinese consumers directly at the front door is getting tougher by the day. The smarter play? Catching the wave from the supply chain side to meet China’s massive demand.
On one hand, China is one of the world’s biggest travel consumption markets, with an enormous appetite for outbound trips. On the other, it’s also a vital source of global hotel, airline, and travel supply.
This July, Expedia Group released a report on the Asia-Pacific travel market that put China’s opportunities front and center. The survey data shows that 41% of Chinese travel industry professionals expect their business demand to grow over the next two to three years. Across the broader APAC region, more than a quarter of industry insiders rank China among the top markets for both inbound and outbound travel growth in that same window.
In an exclusive interview back in May, Alfonso Paredes, Expedia Group’s B2B President and Chief Commercial Officer, talked with us about the company’s journey in China. He explained that one key reason Expedia values this market so much comes down to demand alignment. These days, when many Chinese travelers head overseas, they’re not just hunting for a hotel room—they’re looking to book the entire trip experience.
Alfonso also pointed out a notable shift he’s observed in China’s B2B space over the past few years: consumer travel demand has simply exploded. At the same time, Expedia has been beefing up supply across destinations worldwide.
Another major theme in the earnings report is AI—something Expedia has been hammering on for a while now, and it’s making waves in the B2B space too. As we’ve learned, Expedia’s B2B division announced a suite of new AI-powered products back in May, essentially an AI toolkit designed to streamline how partners integrate Expedia’s supply chain. Alfonso told us that Chinese partners tend to have crystal-clear business goals and are genuinely open to change. In fact, some of Expedia’s new B2B offerings are being piloted right here in the Chinese market.
That said, pivoting from the consumer front door to B2B supply chain services isn’t without its own set of hurdles.
China’s travel industry is going digital at lightning speed, and local players are chasing global opportunities with equal ferocity. Ctrip, for example, has been aggressively expanding its overseas footprint—acquiring international OTA platforms and building out its global supply chain network. As partners go straight into overseas markets on their own, service providers like Expedia are being pushed to step up their game.
What’s more, China’s travel sector is rethinking what it needs from overseas channels. In the past, Chinese hotels, airlines, and travel service providers relied on foreign OTAs to reach international consumers. But with both inbound tourism and outbound expansion on the rise, many large hotel groups are now exploring more direct-to-consumer and self-operated models.
For Expedia, the real question is how to prove its differentiated value beyond the traffic and supply chain muscle it has built over the years. That’s what will ultimately decide whether it can keep growing in China.
