The two Ivy League universities went in opposite directions in the first quarter on the ride-hailing company’s stock, as Harvard acquired more and Princeton sold. Harvard also sold Booking stock, while Princeton exited Beyond Meat stock.

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(Bloomberg) -- Expedia Group Inc. followed its peers in the online travel industry in witnessing a staggering decline in business since the spread of the coronavirus, with total gross bookings down 39% in the first quarter.The Seattle-based company reported total gross bookings of $17.89 billion, including a decline of as much as 90% in the second half of March as the pandemic took hold. Revenue fell 15% to $2.21 billion, its first quarterly drop in eight years. The adjusted loss before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization was $76 million, or 1.83 a share, compared with a loss of 27 cents a year earlier. Analysts had projected a loss of $1.45 a share on $2.11 billion in sales.Chief Executive Officer Peter Kern said Expedia has seen cancellations stabilize and growth return in May as parts of the world emerge from pandemic lockdowns and people start to think about their summer holidays. One of the businesses leading the improvement is Vrbo, the company’s vacation rental unit that competes directly with Airbnb Inc.“We’ve seen a higher bounce back from Vrbo,” Kern said in an interview, including an uptick in demand from travelers renting a house within driving distance of their own homes rather than flying or booking a hotel.In March, Expedia withdrew its full-year forecast as stay-at-home orders began to halt flights and travel around the world. The company had already been struggling, cutting 3,000 jobs in February to simplify what had become a “bloated organization,” as it faced increasing pressure from Google in advertising and nimble startups such as Airbnb. As part of the company revamp, Kern, then vice chairman, took over as CEO in April. At the same time, Expedia announced it was raising $3.2 billion as the impact of the coronavirus began to weigh on the industry. In addition, the company made a “significant reduction” in costs for marketing and discretionary expenses and deferred certain capital expenditures, it said in the earnings report.“We already had pretty ambitious goals about how we would simplify and strengthen the business,” Kern said. “This creates an energy and an ambition that is hard to get when you are just in regular old fine times.” The pandemic crisis could help Expedia “turbo charge“ through some difficult changes, he said.Expedia’s shares gained about 3.7% in extended trading in New York after closing at $79.58. The stock has dropped 26% this year compared with an 8% decline of the S&P 500.As the pandemic raged in March, Expedia saw “unprecedented” cancellation volume and moved to build self-service options for customers to cancel lodging and air bookings without speaking to an agent. As a result, cancellation inquiries for air travel managed without an agent increased to more than 95% in April from 65% in February.“If there was an industry on the front lines bearing the full impact of coronavirus, I would say it’s travel,” said Naved Khan, an analyst at Suntrust Robinson Humphrey Inc. “It is one of the sectors that has been hurt the most and is likely to lag during the recovery because until there is a vaccine people will limit their travel activities.”Airbnb and TripAdvisor Inc. cut a quarter of their workforces and Booking Holdings Inc. has been forced to apply for government aid.Kern acknowledged his appointment as CEO came at a “messy time,” but said it has also provided a rare opportunity for sweeping action. “A lot of friends and business acquaintances have been like, ‘Wow, you really stepped into it in a very tough time,’” he said. “Not a lot of fun is being had, but on the other hand I see this as a crystallizing moment of change for this company.”(Updates with comments from CEO beginning in the third paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

(Bloomberg) -- In nearly three years at the helm of Uber Technologies Inc., Dara Khosrowshahi has focused mostly on cutting costs. Now he’s seeking a return to what defined his career before Uber: buying things.Uber is negotiating a potential acquisition of Grubhub Inc. as the coronavirus pandemic drives a surge in demand for food delivery, people familiar with the negotiations said. If a deal is reached, Grubhub, with a market value of $5.3 billion, would be the biggest Khosrowshahi has ever done.Khosrowshahi, 50, cultivated a reputation as an effective dealmaker when he ran Expedia Group Inc. for more than a decade. He completed 41 transactions there with a total value of $12.7 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. His tenure at the online travel giant was defined by a strategy he picked up as a top lieutenant to IAC/InterActiveCorp’s billionaire chairman, Barry Diller: roll up competitors, integrate them and reap the rewards of scale.The plan for Grubhub follows the same playbook. The companies anticipate there would be major cost savings by eliminating jobs seen as duplicative, a person familiar with the negotiations said. This form of corporate efficiency—embraced by investors based on the market’s reaction to the news this week—sparked a swift rebuke from some officials in the U.S., one of whom described the proposed merger as “pandemic profiteering.” Through a spokesman, Khosrowshahi declined to be interviewed.In the negotiations, Grubhub had been seeking a ratio of 2.15 Uber shares for each one of Grubhub’s, a person familiar with the talks said. The companies are now discussing a deal valuing Grubhub stock at 1.9 Uber shares, the Wall Street Journal reported.Khosrowshahi first developed an admiration for Diller in the 1990s while working as an analyst at the investment bank Allen & Co. Diller, a client of the firm, had made a hostile bid for Paramount Pictures. “I thought to myself, ‘That’s the guy I want to work for,’” Khosrowshahi told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2017. He joined in the dot-com boom and worked his way up through Diller’s portfolio of companies, becoming chief executive officer of Expedia in 2005.Expedia had already purchased Hotwire and Hotels.com before Khosrowshahi took over, and he accelerated the strategy. “Them rolling up a category is not exactly new,” said Stuart MacDonald, who was Expedia’s chief marketing officer at the time and is now a travel industry consultant. “Dara turbocharged it.”Khosrowshahi tried to balance his acquisitiveness with a thriftiness around the office. His desk at Expedia sat in an open-plan office on the 18th floor of a skyscraper in Bellevue, Washinton, overlooking Seattle. He chose not to rent the top floor because he thought it was too expensive, said Mark Okerstrom, who sat beside Khosrowshahi for seven years and worked with him on a series of high-profile deals. “He’s not one of those leaders that presides from an ivory tower,” Okerstrom said.Khosrowshahi’s 12-year tenure at Expedia was defined by an escalating battle with Booking Holdings Inc. Each tried to outflank the other by buying upstart brands, splicing them into their tech ecosystems and squeezing out incremental profits. Revenue at Expedia grew to $10.1 billion, from $2.1 billion, and the company’s share price rose nearly sevenfold while Khosrowshahi was in charge.His time there culminated with two big deals, one after the other. In 2015, Expedia paid $1.6 billion for Orbitz, swallowing the only serious rival besides Booking to secure a hold of the U.S. market. The Justice Department investigated the antitrust implications for six months and approved the deal. Then, months later, Expedia bought HomeAway for $3.9 billion, helping mount a defense against the latest upstart roiling the industry, Airbnb Inc.Neither acquisition went smoothly at first. Revenue took a hit in 2016, due partly to network outages from attempts at merging Orbitz’s systems with Expedia’s and to HomeAway’s runaway spending. “There were a lot of questions at first,” said Okerstrom, who took over as Expedia CEO in 2017 before he was ousted last December after clashing with the board over growth prospects. In hindsight, both deals are seen as largely successful for helping Expedia keep the voracious growth of Booking in check. Despite HomeAway’s costs, it became a core source of growth for the company.When Khosrowshahi wants to get serious at the negotiating table, he has a tell. His hand goes behind his neck, his elbow slides across the desk, and he hones in on the subject with a calming timbre. “He leans into the numbers, he leans into the issues, and he leans into you,” said Rob Greyber, who worked with Khosrowshahi at Expedia for about seven years managing the company’s often-fraught relationship with airlines. “In a deal, when there can be a lot of emotion going on, he can snap out of all that, which is a great asset.”In 2017, Khosrowshahi was selected as the unlikely candidate to replace Uber’s co-founder, Travis Kalanick, as CEO. Uber, just eight years old at the time, was already a global behemoth with a valuation far exceeding that of Expedia. Khosrowshahi’s main tasks were to heal a corporate culture that many employees had described as toxic and bring operational discipline. For the latter, he got to work selling assets and cutting costs.Uber sold operations in Russia and Southeast Asia for stakes in local ride-hailing companies in 2018. He used the same technique last year to offload Uber’s food business in India to Zomato, eliminating the most costly delivery market for the company. The cuts continued last week with the closure of food delivery in seven countries and the dismissal of 3,700 employees worldwide.Khosrowshahi has made purchases at Uber, too. In 2018, he acquired Jump, then a tiny startup renting electric bicycles. “Negotiations were directly with him,” said Vivek Ladsariya, a general partner at SineWave Ventures, an investor in Jump. Khosrowshahi sold the Jump business last week to Lime as part of an investment in the scooter-rental startup. In the Middle East, Uber bought ride-hailing company Careem for $3.1 billion, a deal that closed this year. Then Uber said last week it was cutting 31% of Careem’s staff.Profit margins are slim in food delivery. Consolidation could help Uber reduce costs and turn a profit. But buying a company the size of Grubhub is a new kind of challenge for Khosrowshahi. “He’s not going to rush into anything,” said Woody Marshall, a venture capitalist who has known Khosrowshahi since they were teenagers.(Updates with Uber-Grubhub negotiations in the fifth paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Bars and wineries face new challenges as they prepare to welcome back patrons in a COVID-19 world. Carefully managing crowds, minimizing lines and communicating safety measures are the new norm. To help, OpenTable, the world's leading provider of online restaurant reservations and part of Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: BKNG), is offering its reservation technology to all drink-focused destinations.

Insider Monkey has processed numerous 13F filings of hedge funds and successful value investors to create an extensive database of hedge fund holdings. The 13F filings show the hedge funds' and successful investors' positions as of the end of the first quarter. You can find articles about an individual hedge fund's trades on numerous financial […]

There have been whispers — mostly uninformed — that because private equity firm Silver Lake recently invested $1.2 billion in Expedia Group and $1 billion in Airbnb that the two rivals might have a merger in their future plans. Newly appointed Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern, who has private equity experience of his own as […]

Stocks are hopping Monday, with shares of online travel agencies (OTA) holding company Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) up a whopping 14% in noonday trading, and rival Expedia Group (NASDAQ: EXPE) doing even better -- up 16%. Sabre Corporation (NASDAQ: SABR), which operates a business-to-business...er, business...providing hotel, airline, and rental car inventory, pricing, and availability data to other OTA companies is performing best of all, up a staggering 19.5%!

Brown Advisory recently released its Q1 2020 Investor Letter, a copy of which you can download below. The Large-Cap Growth Fund posted a return of -13.05% for the quarter, outperforming its benchmark, the Russell 1000 Growth Index which returned -14.10% in the same quarter. You should check out Brown Advisory’s top 5 stock picks for […]

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Investors with skin in the travel industry game are hurting this year. Online travel specialists aren't tethered to a single brand or even industry niche, but those models are naturally taking it on the chin. Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) -- the world's second-largest online travel portal with $11.7 billion in trailing-12-month revenue -- entered the holiday weekend trading 46% below its previous high.

Roku reports seeing major viewing growth for ad-supported news and entertainment content, and PayPal suggests its remittance business is hitting an inflection point.

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Deutsche Bank argues that Expedia Group may weather the storm in the travel industry better than most.

As part of its reorganization efforts, Expedia Group is winding down its multifamily building short-term rental business that it began with the 2018 acquisitions of Pillow and ApartmentJet, Skift has learned. Expedia Group bought the two companies for around $54 million, and combined them, along with some staff from its Vrbo subsidiary, to create Expedia Group […]

Tuesday morning brought a big upward move to the stock market, largely in response to growing optimism about the reopening of the U.S. economy as fears about the coronavirus pandemic seem to be subsiding. The Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX: ^IXIC) lagged somewhat behind broader market benchmarks, but it was still up 0.7% shortly before noon EDT. The Nasdaq 100 Index of larger Nasdaq-listed stocks was up a more modest 0.4%.

Asian online travel giant Agoda is laying off 1,500 workers, a downsizing that CEO John Brown promises is the first and final cut he will be making as a result of the coronavirus crisis. The Booking Holdings-owned Asian travel brand has held off staff cuts for as long as it could, first reducing costs across […]

Bireme Capital recently released its Q1 2020 Investor Letter, a copy of which you can download below. In the letter, the hedge fund said that its flagship U.S. equity strategy, Fundamental Value, returned -26.4% on a net basis. The fund underperformed its benchmark, the S&P 500 Index which returned -19.4% in the same quarter. You […]

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