Cendant could be planning to put its travel business, which includes Orbitz, CheapTickets.com and Galileo International, up for sale in a deal that could be worth more than $4 billion, the New York Times said. Sale of the travel business, recently renamed Travelport, would represent a change of plans for Cendant, which had been set to spin off the unit as part of a larger plan announced last October to break up the entire conglomerate into four separate publicly traded companies, the Times said.

The decision to sell the travel unit came after Cendant received several unsolicited offers for the business from private equity firms, including the Blackstone Group, the report said, citing people briefed on Cendant’s plans.

Cendant feels selling the unit is preferable to spinning it off largely because private-equity players are expected to be able to pay more for the division than the public markets may have valued it, the paper said.
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