TripAdvisor Scales Back Instant Booking in Strategy Reversal
Skift Take
TripAdvisor hasn't abandoned letting customers book on TripAdvisor but it has dramatically downplayed the feature in favor of the more lucrative metasearch option. With Trivago and Google making gains in a hyper-competitive sector, TripAdvisor couldn't stick with a strategy that wasn't working.
TripAdvisor indeed appears to be downplaying hotel booking on its own sites, giving more preference to metasearch links to partners in a dramatic reversal of its initial strategy for its so-called Instant Booking feature.
Skift picked up on the feature change April 27 when I reviewed a small sample of 30 TripAdvisor hotel results in New York City and found that all of my results highlighted metasearch links, not the book on TripAdvisor option, in the primary View Deal box, and a TripAdvisor spokesman said the Instant Booking option would mostly be given primacy in cases where it is the lowest rate or for hotels that the customer has previously booked on TripAdvisor.
The presentation of booking on TripAdvisor versus links to partners could thus vary depending who is doing the searching.
We wrote last month: "On TripAdvisor today, it appears that changes in its hotel search algorithms have moved the site away from an earlier approach when it seemed to be giving preference at times to its own Instant Booking, or Book on Trip
