Peter Kern
Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Expedia Group
Thank you, Jon. Good afternoon, everybody. And apologies in advance. Eric and I are both recovering from cold. So, our voices may not be as loud as normal, but we'll do our best. And please ask for clarification on anything you can't hear.
Let me start by saying we were pleased with the quarter. We continued to see strong demand coming back. We continued to see efficiencies in the business. And in general, it pretty much had the shape we expected, which is to say that we had -- we went into the quarter with Omicron looming. Last quarter, we mentioned that we expected that to have some impact early in the quarter, which it did. But very -- we're very pleased that demand came back post Omicron. And Omicron has lived up to sort of our expectations, which were that it would be the shortest wave, it would be the least impactful. And I think as we now are going to BA.2 and other things we're seeing that it's really hard to even detect the blips anymore. So, that's great to see.
We also then were hit with the war in Ukraine, which did have some impact on the EMEA markets. But again, the market -- the consumers seemed to absorb that information. And now EMEA is back to its highest levels since COVID hit. So, again, we've seen these impacts but in each case, a recovery that seems too strong to be held down. So, the recovery has been strong and nicely, we have seen it beyond just domestic travel, which, of course, had been the bright spot for a long time during COVID. We're now starting to see city business pick up, business travel pick up, international travel vectors pick up. So -- and I would say, broadly, while some geographies lag, all geographies are, in general, growing and returning.
So, despite the usual caveats for COVID, now we have rising inflation to worry about and of course, the geopolitical situation. The pent-up demand that's out there for travel seems to be outweighing anything the market can throw at it, and we continue to be feeling very good about a summer recovery that should be very robust. And as I've said before, we've been spending into that recovery, particularly with an eye towards driving long-term customer engagement, buying the right customers, having the right mix of marketing to attract direct and long-term valuable customers. So, with an eye towards lifetime value, we are investing into that strong recovery and will continue to do so.
As an example, our teams have done a great job of driving Vrbo and app downloads. Vrbo, according to our third-party data from a company called Sensor Tower, is the -- was the number one downloaded app in North America in the first quarter of the year. And that's a place where we've had emphasis. Obviously, our emphasis will change through the year and we'll push into our other brands as well. But app particularly is a place where we feel like there's a lot of long-term customer value. We're improving that product dramatically. And we think that's a great place to put capital right now.
Importantly, our direct-to-consumer business is only part of the business and we have our big EXPLORE event coming up over the next few days in Las Vegas where I am right now. I'm pleased to say it is packed and business seems to be booming at the hotels. But that event is with our business partners, all our supply partners, as well as many partners with whom we drive demand. And I've talked about this a little bit before, but we have a thriving B2B business. I haven't spent a lot of time on it. But this is the week where we will now come out and display all the work we've done to reimagine the future of our business and our place in the travel ecosystem and what we've been doing for the last two years. So, we're going to share that with our partners, with general focus on overall traveler experience, how we're rethinking our marketplace and how our platform technology will not only drive our B2C business, but will enable our partners to do much more with their own businesses.
And even though I haven't spent a ton of time talking about it, I just want to reframe that our B2B business is a terrific business, was before COVID, remains a strong business. And we've made a lot of progress during the time of COVID to continue to expand that business, including one example, which is optimized distribution, which I think I've touched on before, but this is a product that we started in partnership with Marriott. We now just had IHG join this year, so two of the largest global hoteliers in the world, as well as many others testing on it. And what it does essentially is it cleans up the wholesale business for these partners. So, wholesale rates have been a huge issue. In the meta universe, they get bled out into the world, and then find their way back into meta. And they end up hurting hotel companies because there are prices out there that are under the brand dotcom prices.
We create a technology to thwart this and basically help our partners get the same B2B business and more in the wholesale markets, but do it in a way where their prices would be protected. And they'd have -- and they make sure they weren't undercut by their own prices out in the world. So, it's been a usually successful program for Marriott. Now, I actually -- again, we hope many more partners will take advantage of the technology. But, that's just one example of the many things we are working on.
I talked about externalizing our technology before. We've had a white label template in a lot of ways where our partners can sell other products. We have airlines with whom we power packages and hotel paths. We recently added Delta to power their car path. We've expanded our offline travel agent business and our share of wallet with our API partners. So, it's a great business. We see expansion for it. And as we'll talk about a lot more this week at EXPLORE, we have a lot more ways we think to help our partners and expand the addressable market there.
So, as we move into that, we will continue to accelerate innovation in our platform. And that innovation will drive not only our B2C business, but also our B2B business. And that's why we're so excited about how we're rebuilding our platform. But all in, we expect '22 to show continued recovery. We expect a robust summer. We expect to continue to drive efficiencies through the business and the real work this year is on delivery, on delivering on the brand work we've done, which looks great so far. We're rolling out new Hotels.com brand work right now and I think the brand's teams have done remarkable work. We've got a lot of new product innovation coming this year, and we're doing a ton of work on the back-end platform. So, all of those things will be rolling out this year and we will have some impact on this year. But really the impact is much longer term, and we see great things ahead as those products all get delivered.
So, with that, I hope all of you can join us at EXPLORE. It's going to be a great event. Our team has worked their butts off to put on an amazing event for close to 3,000 partners who are here and if you can't make it, I'd like you to watch the streaming, and it should be really exciting, and it's a chance for us to really display the work our teams have been working on for the last two years and all of the painstaking time and effort they put into changing our direction for the future.
So, with that, I will leave it to Eric.
