The Multi-Country Sites Strategy For Online Travel Brands: A Deep Dive
Skift Take
When launching a new country site, companies have to consider the signals they are sending at the local level versus resource allocation.
The largest online travel sites grapple with this question daily: What is the most effective way to conquer the world and plant roots everywhere from Greece to Colombia and Indonesia?
It's a complex question with many elements in such an expansion strategy, but one of the tools in these companies' arsenals is launching distinct country sites with their own unique, top-level domains such as TripAdvisor.com.br (TripAdvisor Brazil), Trivago.ro (Trivago Romania), or FlightCentre.com.cn (Flight Centre China), for example.
Skift examined the URLs of the top online travel sites around the world and came up with a list of the top 10 travel-booking companies with the most top-level domains, and uncovered some surprises and nuances in strategy.
Priceline (240), Expedia (81), and HotelsCombined (61) have the most country sites with distinct, top-level domains for consumer-facing websites. In this list, which is an estimate based on companies' answers to our queries in some cases, public filings, and our own research, we counted top-level domains such as Hotels.com and Hoteles.com, but not ca.hotels.com or numerous other country sites (Argentina, Belize, Bolivia etc.) all working off the Hoteles.com domain.
One thing that is immediately apparent from the list is that the number of top-level domains doesn't necessarily correspond to online travel sites with
