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Baidu (BIDU) Broadens Travel Search with New Partnership

August 23, 2012 11:05 AM EDT
Shares of Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) should be taking flight today following news it is now getting into the travel business.

According to reports out Thursday, Baidu has partnered with Edinburgh, Scotland-based Skyscanner to conduct its international flight search. According to the BBC, Skyscanner is the most visited flight search website in Europe. The company also has an office in Singapore.

Co-founder and CEO Gareth Williams commented: "We look forward to partnering with Baidu to provide the very best in travel search to their many users. Overall in Asia, we fully expect Skyscanner to grow to the size of our European business within a relatively short period and we are investing with this in mind."

Skyscanner's site is multilingual, offering flight searches in over 25 languages including Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Spanish and Japanese.

Baidu has made the move shortly after Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) announced the acquisition of Frommer's, the definitive travel guide source, just a few weeks ago. In addition, Google already has a travel site setup to help users book trips.

Baidu already has a travel site, which we assume is this and is a partial owner of Chinese online travel company Qunar.com.

Otherwise, investors in Baidu might be looking at Kayak Software (Nasdaq: KYAK) Thursday. The U.S.-based Internet travel search provider recently had its IPO in July and issued its first quarterly report Wednesday night. Earnings missed expectations by five cents, though revs bested views.

Shares of Baidu are down 1.5 percent.


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