Expedia Group’s business-to-business segment grew gross bookings 19% in the third quarter of 2026 while its consumer segment grew 7%, and the company held consumer direct marketing spend flat at about $1.03 billion. The figures come from Expedia’s third-quarter results release, filed with the SEC on November 4.
Expedia reports two main segments. B2C covers its consumer brands: Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Orbitz, Travelocity and others. B2B covers the companies that market Expedia’s rates and availability to their own travelers, which the release lists as airlines, offline travel agents, online retailers, corporate travel management firms and financial institutions. The segment table shows the faster growth on the B2B side.
What the Q3 release reports
Total gross bookings rose 11% to $34.0 billion, from $30.7 billion a year earlier. Revenue rose 12% to $4.94 billion. Adjusted EBITDA rose 17% to $1.69 billion, with margin up 135 basis points to 34.2%. Booked room nights rose 7% to 115.7 million, and lodging gross bookings rose 10% to $24.9 billion.
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Chief executive Ariane Gorin said the company will “advance our strategy to build the one-stop travel platform for B2B partners,” and the segment numbers match that sentence. B2B gross bookings reached $11.1 billion against $9.4 billion a year earlier, a 19% increase. B2B revenue grew 23% to $1.71 billion. The consumer segment grew gross bookings 7% to $22.9 billion and revenue 6% to $3.07 billion. B2B now accounts for about 33% of gross bookings, up from about 30% in the third quarter of 2025, by our calculation from the segment table.
Where Expedia is spending
The same table breaks out direct selling and marketing spend by segment. B2C spend was $1,028 million, against $1,032 million a year earlier, which the release shows as no change. As a share of B2C gross bookings it fell 34 basis points, to 4.5%. B2B direct selling and marketing spend rose 23% to $1,048 million, so for the first time in the quarterly series the release prints, B2B spend exceeded B2C spend. In the first quarter of 2026 B2C spend was $1,035 million and B2B was $726 million.
The consumer business is also the more profitable of the two at the moment. B2C adjusted EBITDA margin was 43.5%, up 273 basis points. B2B margin was 27.5%, down 134 basis points. In our reading, Expedia is putting its incremental marketing dollars into the lower-margin, faster-growing segment while the consumer brands hold spend steady and widen their margin.
Room nights speed up while rates slow down
The trended metrics table lets a reader compare the quarter with the two before it. Booked room nights grew about 6% year over year in the first and second quarters and 7% in the third. Average daily rate booked, which the release defines as lodging gross bookings divided by booked room nights, moved the other way. It was $228.1 in Q1 2026, $220.6 in Q2 and $215.0 in Q3, which works out to year-over-year growth of about 7%, 5% and 2%. Those year-over-year rates are our calculation from the table, and the release itself states only the 2% for Q3.
Lodging revenue, recognised on a stayed basis, rose 11% to $3.99 billion. That is roughly 16.0% of lodging gross bookings, against 15.9% in the same quarter of 2025, so Expedia’s revenue per booked dollar on hotels did not change much. The volume came from more room nights at slowly rising rates.
The release also splits gross bookings by business model. Merchant bookings grew 15% to $21.7 billion and agency bookings grew 4% to $12.4 billion, which lifts the merchant share of total gross bookings to about 64% from about 61%. The release does not say how much of the merchant growth came from B2B partners.
The guidance after the quarter
Expedia raised its full-year outlook. Gross bookings are now guided to $131.4 billion to $131.9 billion, about 10% growth, up from $129.5 billion to $130.8 billion. Revenue guidance moved to $16.37 billion to $16.43 billion. The fourth-quarter guide implies a sharp slowdown: gross bookings of $27.9 billion to $28.4 billion, up 3.3% to 5.2%, after 11% in the third quarter. The release gives no reason for the step down, and no breakdown of the fourth-quarter guide by segment.
What it means for operators
Revenue managers at hotels that sell through Expedia should look at where their Expedia bookings now originate. The segment figures show total growth coming increasingly from partner channels, and a hotel’s rate and inventory may reach travelers through Expedia’s B2B partners while the hotel’s own reports show only Expedia as the source. Asking the Expedia account manager for a split between Expedia-branded and partner-sourced room nights is a concrete request this release supports.
Independent hotels and small groups that rely on Expedia for incremental demand should note the flat consumer marketing line. Flat dollars against 7% more consumer bookings point to Expedia converting its existing audience more efficiently, and nothing in the release describes a larger paid push on the consumer side. Hotels that want more demand than that should plan for their own direct channels to carry it.
Owners and asset managers should also read the rate trend. Room-night growth accelerated to 7% while rate growth slowed to 2%. That is one company’s marketplace, and the release gives no hotel-level or market-level data on what drove the mix.
Other distribution moves in recent weeks sit alongside these numbers. Booking Holdings said it would put a planned $100 million into its Vayo AI travel agent, and Cloudbeds announced an integration with Meta’s Muse agent that routes bookings to a hotel’s own booking engine. Airbnb, meanwhile, still reports a single-digit share of nights from hotels. Expedia’s own numbers show it growing fastest by selling hotel supply to other companies’ customers.
What to do with it
Three actions follow from the figures. Ask each OTA partner for room nights by origin, brand against partner. Compare the 2% ADR growth in Expedia’s data with your own Q3 rate change on the channel, and note any gap. Rework direct-booking budgets for the fourth quarter, because Expedia’s own guidance expects bookings growth to drop to between 3% and 5%.
Source: Expedia Group Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results (SEC exhibit 99.1)
