Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE), a well-known online travel agency had the biggest decline on Thursday. It ended up falling by almost one-third over the course of the day. The company announced that it saw disappointing revenue figures mainly due to its struggle to handle the changing SEO landscape. It is quite a common problem for small businesses but it is rare to hear a major, multi-billion-dollar public company mention that SEO problems are definitely hurting their revenues and the graph proves the same.
At least three analysts ended up downgrading Expedia in response to the news. An analyst from Piper Jaffray, Michael Olson, downgraded the stock from an “overweight” to just neutral while cutting his price target from $160 to $124. Another analyst Kevin Kopelman from Cowen & Co, who also downgraded Expedia’s stock, ended up calculating that SEO is directly responsible for at least 30% of TripAdvisor’s revenue and 10% of Expedia’s.
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The online travel companies across the board have ended up falling down definitely namely companies like TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP) and Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) who fell by significant margins like Expedia . Expedia is definitely the one that has been the worst hit of the bunch. Thursday being the company’s worst single-day decline in its entire history. Its management team went on records to say that weak SEO volumes and shifts to more high-cost marketing channels have caused problems to their revenues. Similar sentiments have been echoed by the other booking companies as well. TripAdvisor’s chief marketing officer has stated that it has always been difficult to understand Google’s intentions. “It’s always hard to know exactly what Google is doing,” he said.
