Barry Diller Buys Hotwire

from the more-more-more dept

Back in June we had a story mentioning that Barry Diller was nowhere near done in buying up companies to add to his InterActive Corp's growing empire of "remove the middle man" services. The latest buy in the bunch is the Priceline-wannabe Hotwire, which went for a cool $665 million. Hotwire was backed by a number of airlines, and was originally designed to compete with Priceline. Like Priceline, you didn't know which airline was actually supplying the flight you signed up for - but unlike Priceline you actually got a specific price to look at. Diller already owns Expedia, but in attempting to build their own Priceline/Hotwire style site, airlines apparently expressed anger at having their regular fares displayed next to the discount fares. So, Expedia decided to create a separate site - and then realized that was silly, and they might as well just buy up Hotwire instead. It will be interesting to see if this turns up the marketing effort for Hotwire, which never seemed to capture as much attention as the others in the space.

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