Cendant Corporation was an American provider of business and consumer services, primarily within the real estate and travel industries.

[11] After company management found that they had mostly exhausted the field of desirable acquisition targets in the hotel industry, Hospitality Franchise Systems expanded into the real estate business.

[28][29] Just months after the merger, in April 1998 Cendant uncovered massive accounting improprieties at CUC which resulted in one of the largest financial scandals of the 1990s.

At the time, Vice Chairman E. Kirk Shelton was reported to have inflated the company's revenue by $500 million over a period of three years.

As these irregularities in the books of Cendant were discovered in early 1998, an audit committee set up by Cendant's Board of Directors launched an investigation and discovered that the former management team of CUC, including its top executives Walter Forbes and Kirk Shelton, had been fraudulently preparing false business statements for several years.

[citation needed] When this report was released to the public, the resulting damage to the market value for the company was approximately $14 billion, with their stock tumbling from a high of $41 down to nearly $12.

Following the fraud debacle, Cendant began selling businesses to reduce its debt and repair the financial damage caused by the accounting scandal.

[30] In 1998 the company sold Hebdo Mag, a publisher of classified advertising publications, for $450 million to a management buyout group.

[35][36] It made moves towards building a major online travel portal by acquiring Galileo International for $2.9 billion,[37][38] and Cheap Tickets for $425 million.

[48][49] The next month, Cendant sold its Wright Express division, a provider of fleet cards, for $1.03 billion through an initial public offering.

[50] In October 2005, Cendant sold its marketing services division, including its membership shopping programs, to Affinion Group, a vehicle of Apollo Management, for $1.8 billion.

[53][54] In December 2004, Cendant consolidated its control of the Ramada name by buying out Marriott International's stake in the hotel brand.

[61][62] On October 23, 2005, Cendant's strategy of simplification culminated in the announcement that it would split into four separate companies, focused respectively on hotels, real estate, travel services, and rental cars.

[65] On July 31, 2006, Cendant's real estate and hotel divisions were spun off and became separate companies under the names Realogy and Wyndham Worldwide, respectively.