Opodo
Opodo is a Spanish-owned online travel agency. It is a pan-European enterprise, founded by a consortium of European airlines, including British Airways, Air France, Alitalia, Iberia, KLM, Lufthansa, Aer Lingus, Austrian Airlines and Finnair. The travel technology provider Amadeus owned 99.4% of the company until 2011, when it was taken over by eDreams ODIGEO.
Opodo operates out of fourteen European countries with headquarters in Madrid. It operates Opodo-branded sites in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Poland and Switzerland, as well as Travellink-branded sites in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. It also operates several other French travel websites.
History
Opodo was designed and developed by Sapient in London in 2000. It launched its first site in Germany in November 2001, its UK site in January 2002, its French site in April 2002 and its Italian site in January 2006. Giovanni Bisignani, former CEO of Alitalia and present CEO of IATA was Opodo's first CEO. Nicolas De Santis former CMO of web currency beenz.com and president of strategy consultancy and incubator CorporateVision.io was Opodo's first director of marketing, sales and strategy. In 2002, David P. Scowsill was appointed as Opodo's CEO, replacing interim CEO Simon Tucker.Prior to the founding of Opodo, Orbitz was negotiating with European air carriers, trying to get a deal with them, but the airlines were hesitant to work with a company majority-owned by US carriers.
In 2004, Opodo was bought by Amadeus for 62 million euros.
Since 2011, Opodo has been part of the largest online travel company in Europe, eDreams ODIGEO.
Products and services
Opodo Prime
Opodo Prime was launched in 2017, and Metro dubbed it the ‘Netflix of travel’ due to its subscription-based pricing model. It offers additional discounts on all flights and accommodation options. The discounts can be used for up to 9 people on the same booking, across flights and hotels.Opodo Prime hotels
Opodo launched Prime hotels as part of its Prime subscription service in June 2020. For the same yearly subscription fee, 2.1 million accommodation options with up to 50% off were added to Opodo Prime.Flight price index dashboard
In June 2020, Opodo unveiled its flight price index dashboard for the UK market.The service compares current flight prices with prices of the previous year, to suggest the optimum time to book flights. The dashboard uses over 14 billion data touch points from 660 airlines to generate year-on-year price comparisons.