Thomas Cook is to extend its “white label” online booking partnership with Expedia across European markets over the next few months.

The tour operator started selling Expedia’s city break and hotel-only product through its UK website at the end of July, as part of an alliance which gives Thomas Cook customers access to 60,000 hotels through Expedia.

Cook plans to start selling Expedia’s hotel inventory in Belgium this month (August), which will be followed early next year by France and the Netherlands.

The operator will then launch the Expedia alliance in Germany and countries in eastern Europe, followed by its Scandinavian markets.

Peter Fankhauser, CEO of Thomas Cook Group, said:

“I am so excited about the Expedia alliance because it gives us access to the most advanced technologies in the whole market for city breaks and hotel only.

“It’s early days but we can see that it’s really gaining traction. This means that in this part of the business we don’t have to invest in IT.

“It is freeing a bit more investment in web development in our core business of package holidays and sun and beach holidays.”

Fankhauser also confirmed that Thomas Cook would continue to invest around £60 million per year in improving its technology.

The tour operator has a strategy of opening more own-branded hotels, such as its Casa Cook range, which is designed to appeal to younger Generation Z customers (those born from the late 1990s onwards) with design-orientated properties that are “Instagrammable”.

Thomas Cook has also completed a deal to transfer “complementary sun and beach” hotel contracts to Australia-based OTA Webjet, as well as gaining access to Webjet’s portfolio of 7,500 contracted hotels.

The operator said the Webjet deal had helped to drive a 51% rise in bedbank bookings during the first half of 2018.

Online sales in the UK are up by 37% so far this year, and Thomas Cook expects that the share of UK online sales will match its retail sales for the first time by the end of its current financial year in September.

Meanwhile, arch-rival TUI Group made 47% of its total sales online during its last financial quarter between April and June, across all of its markets. This was a rise of one percentage point on the same quarter in 2017.

The figure for online sales was much higher at 65% in TUI’s Northern Region, which includes the UK, Nordic countries, Canada and Russia. This was an increase of two percentage points on the previous year.

The operator said this high figure in the region “demonstrates the strength of the TUI’s online offer”. TUI said:

“Currently the majority of online bookings are made through the TUI website in the respective markets.

“But we are seeing a significant increase (albeit small in absolute terms) in bookings made through the TUI app and would expect this trend to continue with increased app uptake and enhancements to the platform.”

But online booking is at a lower level in TUI’s other markets. its central region – dominated by Germany – is seeing only 21% of bookings coming online, although this share has grown by two percentage points in the past year.

In TUI’s Western Region (France, Belgium and the Netherlands), 56% of bookings were made online during the first nine months of the current financial year – up one percentage point year-on-year.

Related reading from tnooz:

Mintel detects big rise in brand dotcom bookings for UK tour operators (Aug 2018)

TUI Group nears online tipping point, updates on tours and activities (May 2018)

Thomas Cook maps out new tech initiatives (May 2018)