Expedia and Travelocity announced a strategic partnership, which will see Expedia powering Travelocity’s platforms, and giving the site access to its own services. Travelocity will still continue to market its own brand, and will remained owned by Sabre Holdings and independent of Expedia.

“Over the years, Travelocity has become one of the most recognized travel brands in the US and Canada. Going forward, this agreement will enable Travelocity to focus on further building its brand while at the same time providing consumers with an enhanced suite of travel products and services,” said Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. “This announcement stands as a true testament to the advanced capabilities that our significant technology investments over the past several years enabled us to build. We believe volume generated through the agreement will add further scale to Expedia’s global supply and customer service capabilities.”

“Since launching in 1996, Travelocity has grown from a pioneering Internet start-up to one of the leading brands in travel,” said Travelocity President and CEO Carl Sparks. “In staying true to our core values of meeting the needs of both consumers and travel suppliers, we have elected to evolve and strengthen our business model in the US and Canada by working with Expedia, Inc. to offer a top-notch booking platform and a more robust supply of travel options, allowing us to focus increased resources on building our competitive strengths in marketing and retailing.”

While the two companies will remain independent of one another, the deal represents the latest move in a continuing consolidation trend in the travel site space. It follows Priceline’s acquisition of Kayak, Google’s acquisition of Frommer’s and TripAdvisor’s acquisition of GateGuru, not to mention Google’s big ITA Software acquisition.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Expedia owns Hotels.com, Hotwire and several other travel sites.

Image: Travelocity