Expedia, the world’s leading online travel agency, today announced the availability of a major update to its popular Expedia Hotels app for the iPhone and Android OS, which adds full support for iPad and Android tablets.  Since launching in spring 2011 on iPhone and Android, Expedia Hotels has become one of the world’s most popular hotel booking apps. Globally the Expedia Hotels mobile app has been downloaded almost two million times (over 100,000 times in the UK) and has been the iTunes App Store’s #1 free travel app in more than 40 countries including the UK.

To mark the availability of the Expedia Hotels application optimized for tablets, Expedia will host a Twitter chat today - via the @Expedia Twitter handle - starting at 10:00 AM PST (6pm UK time) to talk about the relationship between travel and mobile technology.  The tablet-optimised launch comes at a time when travellers are increasingly choosing to bring their tablet on trips, rather than a laptop. For those on the road or in their living room, Expedia Hotels helps customers quickly find, research and book more than 130,000 hotels, via intuitive prompts, graphics and a beautifully tactile booking experience. The entire booking process – from start to finish – requires no more than four taps of the tablet.

In more than half of the booking scenarios on the iPhone, customers book hotels for the same night. With Expedia Hotels, they can instantly find available hotels within walking distance, and can search and narrow by price, distance or review rating.

“One of the core elements of our Expedia Everywhere strategy is our commitment to giving the world’s travellers a sleek, simple, rich booking experience beyond their desktop computers,” said Andy Washington, Managing Director for Expedia in the UK and Ireland. “It’s hard to imagine a device better suited to that experience than a tablet. Travel is inherently a mobile experience so as more consumers use mobile devices, Expedia.co.uk will become increasingly mobile to fit those needs. Today’s travellers want to be able to make booking decisions in an instant – they want the perfect room at the right price, without delay. This is exactly what Expedia Hotels delivers.”

Key features include:
·      Real-time availability of more than 130,000 hotels worldwide
·      Gorgeous slideshow of hi-res hotel photos
·      One- tap ability to compare multiple hotel details and locations
·      Secure booking in four taps
·      Ability to see all available hotel rooms in vicinity, via GPS, through an interactive map layout
·      Filter by price, distance, hotel name, and traveler rating
·      Access to the Expedia library of more than 4 million individual traveler reviews
·      Amenities and detailed descriptions for every hotel
·      User information is automatically saved to simplify future bookings

Localized for 16 languages worldwide including:
o   Chinese-Simplified
o   Chinese-Traditional (Hong Kong)
o   Danish
o   Dutch
o   English(UK)
o   French
o   German
o   Indonesian/Bahasa (Indonesia)
o   Italian
o   Japanese
o   Korean
o   Malay/Bahasa (Malaysia)
o   Norwegian
o   Portuguese (Brazil)
o   Spanish  
o   Swedish