Expedia Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXPE) stock surged over 11.7% on April 27th, 2018 pre market session. The group made a positive start in 2018 with gross bookings and revenue, rising 15% in the first quarter of 2018 while adjusted EBITDA also performing better than expectations. Total lodging stayed room nights rose 15% in the quarter driven by Easter timing, boosted by 16% rise at their global growth brands, Brand Expedia, Hotels.com, Expedia Partner Solutions and Egencia. The group continued their pace of new property additions for their global lodging portfolio, directly adding 50,000 properties in addition to making another 25,000 HomeAway properties available to their core OTA brands. The pace of property acquisitions in their priority markets started to gain momentum while the group forecasts their property growth in these markets to pick up further in the second quarter.
HomeAway was also a factor posting strong room night rise of 36% year-over-year. They are on track to add more than 180,000 new properties directly to their global lodging portfolio for the full year, while continuing to integrate additional HomeAway properties. HomeAway delivered another strong quarter with 46% rise in gross bookings, driven by ongoing efforts to ramp and optimize performance marketing, as well as a better conversion from ongoing improvements in customer and partner-facing experiences. That also pushed HomeAway’s online and reported gross bookings to $10 billion on a trailing-12-month basis, while the group continues to see a solid potential ahead in the $120 billion alternative-accommodation space.
Egencia gross bookings rose 15%, surpassing $2 billion in quarterly bookings for the first time, while first-quarter revenue surged by 23%. They posted another quarter of over 20% year-over-year growth in new-client signings as the investments made in Egencia sales team over the past year continue to pay dividends. Lodging revenue, including both Hotel and HomeAway, rose 15%, in line with the stayed room night growth. Easter timing shift added an estimated 150 basis points to total lodging room-night growth.
On the other hand, without HomeAway, the revenue per room night was flat, while average daily rates rose over 5% year-over-year, which is a slightly smaller gap against the last quarter. The group continues to expect the gap between revenue per room-night and average daily rates to narrow as throughout the year.