“The CarTrawler acquisition is another huge, exciting step towards our ambition of building the most complete B2B travel platform,” Alfonso Paredes, Expedia’s president for B2B and chief commercial officer, said in a news release Wednesday (May 20). “Last year, Expedia Group B2B set out a bold vision to expand our APIs beyond lodging. Acquiring Tiqets helped us solve for activities at scale. Adding CarTrawler now extends that same strategy into car rentals, ground transport and Insurtech.”
CarTrawler’s platform connects more than 550 car rental suppliers and 500-plus mobility suppliers to upwards of 300 travel brands around the world, including more than 70 airlines, the release added.
The acquisition is designed to give Expedia’s supply partners “access to incremental demand through a much larger distribution base,” while its B2B demand partners get deeper access to car rental, ground transport and Insurtech supply at better rates.
“Travelers in turn get unrivaled choice and superior value, whether booking through Expedia Group brands or via B2B partners,” the release added.
In tandem with the acquisition, Expedia also announced the debut of its AI-focused “Intelligent Experience Platform,” a suite of offerings designed to help the company’s B2B partners plug Expedia’s intelligence into their own interfaces and agent workflows with less complexity.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
During an earnings call earlier this year, the company said it was responding to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) assistants and agentic commerce both by embracing them and by offering services that attract travelers directly to its own platforms.
“As gen AI changes how travelers do trip discovery, it opens up new growth opportunities for us,” Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin said during an earnings call. “We’re working with all the major platforms to capture traveler demand, ensuring our brands show up prominently in gen AI searches and function effectively with agentic browsers.”
In other B2B news, new research from PYMNTS Intelligence and The Clearing House finds that companies employing real-time payment rails consistently see notably better outcomes across nearly every critical operational metric, from liquidity management and reconciliation to supplier relationships and strategic flexibility.
“The issue is no longer whether the current system works,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this week. “It is whether corporate payment systems that are merely good enough are increasingly slowing down firms that are looking for something that’s a little better.”
