Expedia to buy hotel booking site Venere
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
On July 15 Venere announced on their blog that Expedia is buying Venere. Venere is an online booking website for hotels worldwide, with a large number of hotels in Italy. Expedia is a large online travel company running Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, TripAdvisor.com and other travel sites.
Venere started out in 1995 as an Italian company. In 2006, the private equity firm Advent International acquired 60% of Venere (a controlling stake in the company).
Earlier this year, Venere acquired WorldBy.com. WorldBy.com runs several destination sites (Tuscany.net, RomeBy.com, FlorenceBy.com) that represent hotels and vacation rentals (villas). Venere has always had vacation rental/villa rental listings as well as hotels. With the acquisition of WorldBy, they are heading more into the villa rentals market.
My old website, SlowTrav.com, was a Venere affilate since 2003. In 2006, when Venere introduced their “popup girl” (see screensnap above), I decided to change from Venere to A Hotel in Italy (for Italy hotels) and Booking.com (for the rest of Europe). Did Venere think that graphic would appeal to the people who book hotels? I don’t see her on the site now - maybe she has been removed (good idea!).
