Booking.com Finally Joins Major Hotel Chains in Book on TripAdvisor
Skift Take
Booking.com's participation in Book on TripAdvisor is a major win for TripAdvisor, which launched its Instant Booking product a couple of years ago and was slow to get hotels, and especially big online travel agencies to join. The U.S. Justice Department was correct, during the Expedia-Orbitz merger review, to see TripAdvisor Instant Booking as an emerging player to heighten competition.
As TripAdvisor ramps up hotel bookings on its own sites and apps, the Priceline Group and Expedia have been playing very hard to get but Priceline's Booking.com has now started participating in TripAdvisor Instant Booking, and is the first major online travel agency to do so.
Booking.com's participation -- and sister brands Priceline.com and Agoda will likewise join in -- has big implications. TripAdvisor views this first strategic partnership with a global online travel agency for its Book on TripAdvisor solution as "a major milestone."
At mid-day Tuesday, TripAdvisor's stock price had jumped 23 percent, Expedia's had fallen nearly 4 percent and Priceline Group's stock price fell 1.86 percent.
There had been a lot of speculation that Booking.com and Expedia -- which together accounted for 46 percent of TripAdvisor's total revenue in 2014 -- would reduce their marketing spend with TripAdvisor while the site that previously was known primarily for its user-generated hotel reviews evolves into a quasi-online travel agency and hotel booking site.
But Booking.com is heightening its participation with TripAdvisor now -- and that's a testament to TripAdvisor's effectiveness as a marketing vehicle. Expedia, which owns a hotel metasearch site of its own, albeit one of a more diminutive nature in Trivago, could take a similar or different path, including throwing its lot in with the emerging, but much smaller Book on Google. That remains to be seen.
The TripAdvisor-Priceline Group agreement on T
