InterActive Buys Beijing Travel Firm

Barry Diller’s Internet empire got a little bigger Monday.

InterActiveCorp said it purchased a 30% stake in ELong Inc., a Chinese online travel provider, for $60 million.

New York-based InterActiveCorp also acquired securities that, if exercised, would increase its ownership in the Beijing-based company to 51%.

The move fits InterActiveCorp’s strategy of buying Internet companies that are “competitive on a time-sensitive basis,” said Daniel E. Hess, a senior vice president at ComScore Networks, a market research firm that counts InterActiveCorp among its clients.

Travel, Hess added, is a “no-brainer.”

China’s $87-billion travel and tourism market is forecast to grow to $300 billion by 2014, InterActive said, citing a report by the World Travel & Tourism Council.

Diller, a former Hollywood executive who is InterActiveCorp’s chairman and chief executive and controls a majority of the company’s voting rights, has recently focused the firm on a collection of Web businesses, which include Expedia Inc., Hotels.com, Ticketmaster, LendingTree and Match.com. InterActiveCorp also owns HSN, a home-shopping cable channel.

Shares of InterActiveCorp fell 11 cents to $27.89 on Nasdaq.