Expedia reached an agreement to buy a majority stake in Germany-based travel metasearch company Trivago for 477 million euros (about $632 million). The transaction is expected close by next June.
The announcement comes five weeks after competitor Priceline said it would buy Kayak, the U.S. leader in travel metasearch.
Trivago, which was founded in 2005, has doubled its annual revenue for each of the past four years and will generate about $132 million in revenue this year, about half of Kayak’s annual revenue.
"The Trivago team built one of the largest, fastest-growing and most well-known travel sites in Europe, conducting more than 100 million hotel searches annually," Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement Friday.
Priceline last month said it would buy Kayak for $1.8 billion in an attempt to drive further traffic to the OTA’s overseas sites such as Booking.com and Agoda. Analysts forecast Kayak revenue woiuld jump 32% this year to $296 million.
Follow Danny King on Twitter @dktravelweekly.