TripAdvisor's Instant Booking Push May Signal Larger Trend in Booking Behavior

With TripAdvisor emphasizing its own hotel bookings over lead-generating metasearch, it's no surprise that outgoing traffic from TripAdvisor to third-party websites might experience a percentage drop. That trend among travel review/booking sites, principally TripAdvisor and Yelp, was confirmed in a just-released study from SimilarWeb, which found that these sites sent 65.5 percent fewer visitors to third-party sites in the U.S. in March 2016 than they did a year earlier. The trend coincides with TripAdvisor's global rollout of Instant Booking on its own sites although the depth of the drop-off that SimilarWeb points to -- if true -- is dramatic. That's because TripAdvisor has stated that it is committed to continuing to operate metasearch and its referrals to hotel and online travel agency partners even as TripAdvisor prioritizes processing bookings on its own sites. For Yelp, we can speculate that perhaps the decline in providing referrals to external websites could have something to do with increased traction for SeatMe, its own restaurant reservations platform, versus sending traffic to its forrmer partner, the Priceline Group's OpenTable. TripAdvi