MGT520
Strategic and Operational Plan for Expedia, Inc.
The SWOT analysis for Expedia, Inc. identified two goals that the company wanted to achieve. In this paper we will identify the two goals and apply a strategic plan to one and a organizational plan to the other. This will help develop a roadmap that the company can follow to measure progress of these goals and ultimately obtain success.
The first goal identified was to own and power the best travel brands in the world. To this goal we will first apply a strategic plan. The operational plan would consist of first organizing and identifying the work steps needed to bring this plan to fruition. The first step would be to determine where the company currently is in regards to its strengths and weaknesses. In this case Expedia is strong in the area of already offering a broad range of service and travel offerings and it is also strong in the area of having a very large and diverse portfolio of travel brands. This would establish that Expedia would need to further acquire travel companies/agencies or partner with other competing travel agencies to continue to grow to become the world’s largest offering of travel services. Expedia would need to set a timetable of which companies to acquire and how long it would take to integrate these into its current portfolio. Once identifying where the company currently is, where it wants to the next step is to develop an action plan. “The company should articulate strategies for achieving results. Strategies should reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the entity engaged in the planning.” (Schilder, 1997) These plans would set the roadmap of the time, resources and expense for the company to achieve its goal. Once this has been determined the company will move the strategic plan to an operational plan and execute to achieve the goal. The Stragegic plan of the company is based off the operational plans set