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Opodo is a Spanish-owned online travel agency which offers deals in regular and charter flights, low-cost airlines, hotels, car rental, dynamic packages, holiday packages and travel insurance. It is a pan-European enterprise, founded by a consortium of , including British Airways, Air France, Alitalia, Iberia Airlines, KLM, Lufthansa, Aer Lingus, Austrian Airlines and Finnair. The travel technology provider Amadeus owned 99.4% of the company until 2011, when it was taken over by eDreams ODIGEO.
Opodo operates out of fourteen European countries with headquarters in Madrid. It operates Opodo-branded sites in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Poland and Switzerland, as well as Travellink-branded sites in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. It also operates several other French travel websites.
Prior to the founding of Opodo, Orbitz was negotiating with European air carriers, trying to get a deal with them, but the airlines were hesitant to work with a company majority-owned by US carriers.
In 2004, Opodo was bought by Amadeus for 62 million euros.
Since 2011, Opodo has been part of the largest online travel company in Europe, eDreams ODIGEO.
The Opodo Prime subscription offers additional discounts on all flights as well as up to 50% off on over two million accommodation options.
Membership to Opodo Prime costs £69.99 a year, and subscribers are reported to save an average of £215 for a week's holiday including flights and accommodation. Opodo Prime discounts can be used for up to 9 people on the same booking, across both flights and hotels.
The service compares current flight prices with prices of the previous year, to suggest the optimum time to book flights. The dashboard uses over 14 billion data touch points from 660 airlines to generate year-on-year price comparisons.
The price tracker dashboard uses AI-technology and gives customers more transparency over airline prices, thus helping them make informed decisions before purchasing a flight.
Opodo plan to include a price prediction functionality in the future.
Independent board member James Hare (James Otis Hare II) oversaw the public launch on April 4, 2014.
eDreams offered its stock at 10.25 Euros per share.
That stock price had fallen to 1.02 Euros by October 24 of 2014, wiping out over one billion Euros of market capitalization.
Some commentators called the launch “Europe’s worst performing IPO of 2014”.
eDreams moved quickly, asking their shareholders for authorization to “Discharge to Mr. James Otis Hare for the exercise of his mandate as director of the Company until his resignation as of 25 March, 2015.”
In June 2015, CEO Dana Dunne introduced a new strategy focusing on mobile, revenue diversification and customer experience improvements, which led to a strong turnaround in business performance.
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