Walter Lo Faro, director of market management, Middle East & Indian EXPEDIA

Q: How’s business for Expedia in the Middle East?
A: We started in the region in 2006 and since then we have been growing like crazy. The past five years has been amazing. We grew about five or six times from the size we started, and it’s not just us — it’s the whole online business.

Hoteliers will tell you the same thing. Their online business is growing by 100 – 200% every year.

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Q: How is hotels.com going?
A: It is taking off. If we see our results, the Arabic site is working pretty well. The level of conversion is lower than in Europe, but the English version of the site works extremely well, and the level of conversion is similar to in the UK.

Q: Are there plans to launch an Arabic version of Expedia.com?
A: There are no immediate plans for this. Expedia is slightly more complicated while hotels.com is basically a hotel bed bank, so that is disproportionally easier to launch. We always start with Hotels.com, in every country.

We make it work for a few years and see what happens and then according to the results we decide whether an Expedia site is to be launched or not.
You have to fine-tune quite a few things here especially when you launch an Arabic site, it’s quite complicated. But you never know, it pretty much depends on how we will grow in the future.

Q: What is your plan for Expedia in the Middle East?
A: In principle we want to exceed traveller expectations in terms of price competiveness and site content. The mission is to build the world’s largest and most intelligent travel marketplace.