Groupon Adds 20,000 Properties To Its Hotel Feature
Groupon added 20,000 hotels, up from the several hundred hotel flash sales that it previously ran. / PlaceIt by Breezi — Groupon wants to be much more than a flash sales site when it comes to hotels.
Context & Ripple Effects
Groupon has been assembling a travel business piece by piece: a 2011 booking partnership with Expedia put transactional hotel bookings on the site, and its acquisition of travel search company Uptake in February 2012 gave it search technology beneath the deals. The move from several hundred flash-sale hotels to 20,000 bookable properties turns those scattered bets into an always-on lodging inventory.
First-order effects
- The expansion lands two weeks after Groupon paid $43 million for flash fashion retailer ideeli and days after it began testing excess-inventory sales for small brick-and-mortar stores — together signaling a deliberate push past daily deals into broader retail categories.
- Hotels gain access to Groupon's email-driven deal audience on a standing basis rather than through one-off flash campaigns, changing how they can fill unsold rooms.
Second-order effects
- Online travel agencies face a discounter that now carries meaningful hotel inventory at scale, pressuring them to sharpen their own last-minute and discount offerings.
- The breadth of inventory strains the logic of Groupon's earlier Expedia arrangement, which was built when Groupon's travel role was narrower than running its own large hotel catalog.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — ideeli for fashion, small-store inventory tools, hotels at scale — Groupon is repositioning from a deal-a-day publisher toward a multi-vertical marketplace, a structural answer to the revenue and profit misses and CEO change it disclosed after weak earnings in April 2013.
The trend: Daily-deals companies are converting their deal audiences into always-on vertical marketplaces, with travel and fashion as the first battlegrounds.