It is important to understand how multi-national companies have taken over the travel industry to such an extent.

So taking a deep dive it appears they are all connected in some way to a larger company, we call them Mega-Owners. How is it possible to get fair deals when even within their own brands they have different prices.

The list is as follows and is correct today, tomorrow? Well who knows who will buy each other.

Expedia Group owns:

Expedia.com,Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, Venere.com, Trivago, Travelocity, HomeAway, TripAdvisor, Orbitz Worldwide

Orbitz Worldwide (USA) owns CheapTickets; ebookers in Europe; and HotelClub and RatestoGo in Australia.

Booking Holdings (Netherlands) owns

Booking.com, Priceline.com, Agoda.com, Kayak.com, Cheapflights, Rentalcars.com, Momondo, and OpenTable, Travelweb.com, Lowestfare.com, and Ctrip.

Ctrip owns Skyscanner, Tours4fun, Trip.com, Trip by Skyscanner The Priceline Group announced it was investing $250 million in Ctrip.

TripAdvisor Media Group (USA) owns

Tripadvisor.com, Airfarewatchdog, BookingBuddy, Citymaps, Cruise Critic, Family Vacation Critic, FlipKey, GateGuru, Holiday Lettings, Holiday Watchdog, Independent Traveler, Jetsetter, Lafourchette, Niumba, OneTime, SeatGuru, SmarterTravel, Tingo, TravelPod, Tripbod, VacationHomeRentals, Viator, and VirtualTourist.

Trip.com (Chinese) owns:

Skyscanner, Trip.com, MakeMyTrip, Travix, Qunar, Ctrip.com, TrainPal

So this means

There are  “mega owners” of the travel search industry controlling it all.

It’s impossible to predict which sites will have the best deals, even they can’t do that.

So what do we do? We build our own platform and bring better prices – if we can’t compete with their marketing dollars, we will compete on pricing. See us here at My Carte Travel.