Trivago Acquisition of Hotel-Tech Startup Highlights Evolution of Booking Sites
Skift Take
Imagine if Expedia and Priceline saw selling flights as an increasingly important part of their business and started offering airline IT solutions. That's what they and Trivago are essentially doing on the hotel side of the ledger, embedding themselves as hotel-technology providers. Now it has become a downright trend.
Trivago acquired Switzerland-based hotel-tech startup Base7booking more than five months ago, securing a 52.3 percent stake, and now it's making a big push to get small and independent hotels to sign up for Base7booking's cloud-based property management system.
The move by Expedia-controlled Trivago punctuates how online travel sites, including Trivago, Expedia and Booking.com, are no longer content focusing single-mindedly on their consumer businesses but to varying degrees are getting deep into the business-to-business side of the hotel business too.
Consider that Trivago's Hotel Manager product already offered hoteliers marketing capabilities, especially when it came to improving performance through Trivago metasearch, and now Trivago is integrating Base7booking's property management system, which enables hoteliers to manage daily operations, run reports, send invoices and enhance their digital and email marketing.
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