Expedia Buys Majority Stake In European Hotel Search Site Trivago For $632 Million

Colleen Taylor

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch and TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked as a reporter for GigaOM, the Financial Times’ Mergermarket newswire, and the semiconductor industry newsletter Electronic News. Disclosure: Colleen holds a small amount of shares in AOL, which were awarded as part of her employment contract with TechCrunch. She personally... → Learn More

Friday, December 21st, 2012
trivago

Online travel giant Expedia announced this morning that it will acquire a majority stake in Trivago, the Dusseldorf, Germany-based hotel search and price comparison site.

In a regulatory filing, Expedia said it will pay a total of about €477 million Euro, which is approximately $632 million in US dollars, in exchange for a 61.6 percent share of Trivago. €434 million of the deal is in cash, and €43 million is in Expedia stock. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2013, pending regulatory approval.

Expedia, which is traded on the NASDAQ stock market, has a valuation of approximately $8 billion.

It’s a very good turnout for Trivago, which was founded seven years ago and has grown into an extremely popular — and profitable — hotel room search site for the European market and beyond. Trivago operates in 30 countries and expects to exceed €100 million in net revenue for 2012, according to a press release issued regarding the Expedia deal.

Today’s deal also seems to show a nice boost in valuation for the company since its last funding round. In the spring of 2011, Trivago sold a 25 percent stake to late-stage venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners for a reported €40 million – that’s an overall valuation of €160 million Euro. Today’s stake sale valued the entire company at nearly €800 million.


Company: trivago
Website: trivago.com
Launch Date: 2005
Funding: $1.14M

trivago is a hotel price comparison site and member of the European travel network. Located in Dusseldorf, Germany, the internet company counts over 30 platforms worldwide. The website compares prices from more than 100 booking sites & hotel chains, showing offers throughout the web for over 500,000 hotels. At trivago, hotels can be found through a metasearch and then filtering the results by an assortment of criteria. Additionally, trivago is a large travel international community that shares...

→ Learn more