Expedia ready to catch Booking, time to buy travel stock, Barron’s says

Although it has had a rough year, Expedia (EXPE) could be an investor’s ticket to paradise. A report that Uber Technologies (UBER) has looked into purchasing the online travel agent only makes the case stronger, Teresa Rivas writes in this week’s edition of Barron’s. As painful as the pandemic was for online travel agents, it allowed Expedia to rapidly integrate the numerous brands it had acquired in the prepandemic years into a more streamlined platform, giving it a chance to maximize the value of its data and capture the benefits of scale. Expedia also trades for just 11 times forward earnings, half of Booking’s (BKNG) 22 times–simply too cheap for what Dan Ahrens, managing director and portfolio manager at AdvisorShares, calls a “blue-chip travel stock.”