Expedia was one of the many .com travel websites launched in the mid-1990s, the brainchild of internet entrepreneur Rich Barton, who would go on to found Zillow and Glassdoor.
Barton was working for Microsoft at the time and incubated the project inside the tech giant, launching in 1996. Three years later, Expedia was spun off by Microsoft into a public company, with Barton as the CEO.
With the dotcom crash of 2000, many recent IPOs fell victim to huge drops in stock market value. American holding company IAC acquired a controlling interest in Expedia in 2001, and took it off the market in 2003.
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IAC bundled Expedia with TripAdvisor in 2005 and pushed it back onto the public market. For a time, Expedia quietly plodded along, with TripAdvisor being spun out into its own company in 2011.
A flurry of acquisitions between 2013 and 2015 built the Expedia Group of today, these included trivago, Wotif, Travelocity, Orbitz and HomeAway….
