A Microsoft project that became a company name.

Expedia began as a project inside Microsoft. English Wikipedia says the service was founded on 22 October 1996 in Redmond, Washington, led by Rich Barton and a small team, and launched on the Microsoft Network that month, letting consumers reserve flights, cars and hotels online and browse multimedia travel guides. Microsoft, Wikipedia says, released a public beta of the booking engine that October and positioned it as a consumer complement to its MSN portal. The name, according to Wikipedia’s article on the parent company, joins “exploration” and “speed”.

The business did not stay inside Microsoft for long. Wikipedia records a public offering in 1999, after which control passed to Barry Diller’s USA Networks, later renamed IAC/InterActiveCorp, which agreed to buy a controlling stake in 2001 and took full ownership in 2003. IAC then spun its travel holdings out as a separate Nasdaq-listed company, Expedia, Inc., on 9 August 2005. Over the following years that company gathered a family of other travel names, among them Hotels.com, Hotwire and Vrbo, and in December 2011 it spun off its review business, TripAdvisor, as a company of its own.

That history matters for the identity because the word “Expedia” now does two jobs. It is the name of a consumer travel site and app, and it is also the root of the corporate name Expedia Group, adopted in 2018, which sits above sister brands such as Hotels.com, Vrbo and Travelocity. Wikipedia says the group moved its headquarters from Bellevue to Seattle in 2019, and since July 2023 Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo have shared a loyalty programme called One Key.

A cartoon plane, a darker blue and a new tagline.

The consumer logo has changed several times while keeping a travel motif. Writing for SitePoint on 6 January 2010, Jennifer Farley described the mark Expedia had used for roughly the previous decade as a blue bubble with a small yellow cartoon aeroplane flying around it, and noted that the early versions included “.com”, which was later dropped as the company opened sites in other countries. The 2010 redesign, she wrote, replaced the bright yellow and blue with a more sombre dark blue palette, kept the aeroplane in a more stylised shape, and added the tagline “Where You Book Matters.” in a handwritten-style typeface.

A larger reset came in April 2021. PhocusWire reported on 19 April 2021 that Expedia Group was overhauling its principal brand, Expedia.com, a year after Peter Kern had been named chief executive. Alongside new product features, the company updated the logo and introduced a new tagline, “It matters who you travel with”. The campaign opened with a film starring Rashida Jones that was scheduled to air in the United States during the Oscars broadcast on 25 April, followed in the United Kingdom by a spot starring Naomie Harris during the BRIT Awards in May. Expedia’s marketing chief told PhocusWire that the brand wanted a deeper, continuous relationship with travellers, as a travel companion.

The advertising has continued to lean on familiar faces. Marketing Week reported in April 2026 that Expedia’s platform “The One Place You Go to Go Places” had launched in the UK on 1 April, after earlier rollouts in the United States, Canada and Mexico built around a partnership with Mattel featuring the character Ken. That campaign opened with a spot during the 2026 Super Bowl, in which Ken leaves Malibu and tries to plan a trip. Natalie Wills of Expedia Group told the magazine the UK media plan would lean on digital channels, with an emphasis on YouTube.

Design and documentation.

Travel sites live on small screens as much as large ones, so their identities are tested at very different sizes. A wordmark that reads well across the top of a desktop search page has to survive as a home-screen app icon, a favicon in a browser tab and a tiny badge on a booking confirmation email. Many travel brands answer that problem with a compact symbol or a single letter that can stand alone when the full name will not fit, and keep the wordmark for larger placements.

Colour does a lot of work in this category. A consistent brand colour helps a user spot the right app among dozens on a phone and recognise the brand inside a crowded comparison results page. Mascots and characters play a similar role: an animal, a figure or a costumed spokesperson can carry a brand across television, social video and outdoor advertising without relying on the name alone.

Television spokespeople and recurring advertising characters have long been part of the travel-site playbook, giving a web service a face and a voice. When a company refreshes its identity, these elements are often redrawn, retired or brought back, so it is worth checking the date of any logo, icon or campaign before treating it as current.

A consumer mark and a corporate e.

The corporate identity is a separate piece of design from the consumer logo. On 30 March 2018 LogoLounge reported that Pentagram had created a new identity for Expedia Group centred on a specially shaped lowercase letter “e”, a letter that appears twice in the name. The studio’s own project page, credited to partner Paula Scher in Pentagram’s New York office, says the designers drew the “e” as an aerodynamic letterform with a tapered eye and a flat-cut terminal, then worked with type designer Jeremy Mickel to develop a full custom typeface, Expedia Group Display. Pentagram says secondary type is set in Neuzeit Grotesk and that the palette pairs a brilliant blue with black, and that the system extends to the group’s business-to-business sub-brands and to an endorsement line that can sit beside the consumer brands.

LogoLounge read the open counter of that “e” as suggesting continuous motion, with the bold blue pointing to water and sky. Pentagram describes the goal as letting Expedia “own the e”, so that promotions and collateral are recognisable even before the full name is read.

The result is a two-level identity. Travellers meet the consumer Expedia mark in an app or a television spot, with its long-running aeroplane-and-globe idea and its yellow accent, while partners, investors and employees meet the blue corporate “e” of Expedia Group. Both sit on the same word coined in Redmond in 1996, and the brand’s advertising, from “Where You Book Matters.” to “It matters who you travel with” and the Ken campaign, has kept returning to the idea of the trip rather than the transaction.

For a design guide, Expedia shows how a single coined word can carry a consumer service and a holding company at once, with each given its own visual register. Compare Airbnb, another travel brand built around a custom symbol, and Google, whose colour-led identity also has to work at app-icon size. For this guide we use sky blue, wing yellow and night ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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