Interview: Trivago Building Big Team in Shift Toward Direct-Hotel Relationships

Search for a hotel in New York City on travel-comparison site Trivago.com and the booking links you'll see are overwhelmingly to online travel agencies, from Expedia and Priceline.com to Booking.com and lesser-known sites. In fact, in a search for an October 18 stay, you have to scroll down to the 11th listing, well below the "fold," for a blue-highlighted link to an official hotel website, in this case to the Holiday Inn 6th Ave. - Chelsea in New York City. In an exclusive interview [see Q&A below] with Skift, Johannes Thomas, Trivago managing director and head of hotel relations, says the company has shifted strategy over the last year toward emphasizing direct relationships with hotels in part because they are the best source of "exceptional" content about their properties. Asked whether Google's and TripAdvisor's moves to accept hotel bookings on their own sites is an opportunity or a challenge for Trivago, Thomas says, "I think it is both. I think it is a big task and that is why we are building up a big team to build relationships with hotels and to take time for education [about the value of metasearch]." Dusseldorf, Germany-based Trivago has more than 700 employees and its website currently lists 103 job openings. Independent Hotels are the Target To be sure, Thomas emphasizes that relationships with online travel agencies "will remain a priority," and the hotel "focus for quite awhile already has been has been mostly on chains." With the plethora of independent hotels, the previous tilt toward chains meant "we only get one half of the package and we need to strengthen our bonds with the rest of the industry," Thomas says. "The focus was the OTAs, as you have seen, and we want to shift that and add on top of the hotel chains." "What are really the sources where we get the best content?" Thomas asks. "As we clearly see, the hotel is the most valuable source of information. He [or she, i.e. the hotel manager] knows best what its strengths are. He knows the inside of his hotel and that's why we are changing the direction. We are investing a lot now in building strong relations with the hotel." Booking Sites Getting Intimate With Hotels Trivago's new tilt toward building direct ties to hotels in order to access their content and rates takes place as TripAdvisor is signing up chain after chain for its book-on TripAdvisor Instant Booking product, Google has debuted a similar initiative, Booking.com has created its Booki