Priceline, Expedia boycott TripAdvisor's mobile bookings engine

Priceline PCLN and Expedia EXPE continue boycotting TripAdvisor's Mobile Booking Engine, while working with smaller MetaSearch players. 

TripAdvisor rolled out it's mobile booking engine capabilities some time ago, claiming that their Mobile Booking Experience is far superior from other booking engines out there. Their Instant Booking feature (this is how they call it) is powered by Tingo and Getaroom. While the user experience may be questionable for many smaller and/or older online booking engines, this is not the case in 2014/2015 anymore - most bigger brands understand the increasing value of mobile visitor and have invested into their booking engines, some of them taking Mobile-First design approach.

TripAdvisor's claims (who by the way has no real life experience in hotel eCommerce) do not apply bigger OTAs (and even bigger brands like Marriott). The question is not about the (mobile) user experience - it's about who owns the data. Every visitor to the site leaves a trail, and bigger brands and OTAs like Booking.com take advantage of owning the user behavior data and remarketing capabilities. This invaluable big data is lost when reservation is pushed through the 3rd party site - eventually user data will be owned by TripAdvisor and not your hotel website.

And here comes the advertising cost: Instant Booking partners have to cash out a hefty commission fee - ranging from 12 to 20 percent. According to sources, TripAdvisor's click-based ad revenue (metasearch-driven) rose 31% Y/Y in Q3 to $247M. They achieved this by creating artificial demand for their bid-based ad positions: The same amount of advertisers have to fight for the 2 top ad positions instead of 3 - Instant Booking is always sitting at the top, and you cannot outbid it - thus  raising advertising costs and lowering the ROAS.
  • Priceline, Expedia, Marriott and other big players avoid TA Instant Booking
  • Instant Booking is powered by 3rd Party, and participants will not own the customer data
  • Commission rates are high, and TA is quite aggressive, but adoption rate is low
  • TripAdvisor should stick to what they are good at - hotel reviews.
Just FYI: TA Desktop Instant Booking feature is about to be rolled out across all client portfolio.


Article at skift.com.

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