Travel

Hotels.com was established in 1991 by David Litman and Robert Diener as the Hotel Reservations Network HRN, providing hotel booking via a toll-free phone number in the United States. In 2001, the company was acquired by USA Networks Inc USAI which also acquired a controlling interest in Expedia, an online travel booking company.

After buying the domain name for approximately US 11 million, HRN changed its name in 2002 to Hotels.com and launched the offline brand 1-800-2-Hotels as well as allowing hotel bookings on line. There followed a period of rapid international expansion with 29 sites added over the next two years. In 2003, USAI was renamed InterActiveCorp IAC. In 2005 IAC separated its travel business under the name Expedia Inc. Hotels.com then became an operating company of Expedia Inc.

In 2006, Hotels.com experienced a data breach when a laptop containing personal information of approximately 243,000 customers was stolen. The compromised data included names, addresses, and credit card information. There was no evidence of fraudulent activity. In 2007, the company was found in violation of California's Unruh Civil Rights Act in a lawsuit regarding accessibility for customers with mobility disabilities.

In 2011, the site launched an iPad application and updated its mobile phone product on iPhone and Android.

On December 1, 2016, Hotels.com took over Venere.com another Expedia owned company.

In 2019, it was reported that the Hotels.com mobile app used session-replay technology from Israeli firm Glassbox, which recorded user activity and sent data to Expedia servers without explicit user consent.

Loyalty program

The first loyalty program for Hotels.com was called Hotels.com Rewards formerly Welcome Rewards and rolled out across multiple countries from 2008 to 2011. On July 6, 2023, Hotels.com replaced Hotels.com Rewards with One Key. The new program decreased rewards by 80 percent, including bookings paid in advance under the terms of the prior program. The website Frequent Miler criticized these changes as an unusually large devaluation of the program not comparable to any other loyalty program change in the hospitality industry for a company not undergoing bankruptcy proceedings.