ComScore Study Claims TripAdvisor Is Top-Visited Travel Site Before Booking
Skift Take
Mirror mirror on the wall, which is the most-influential travel company of all? TripAdvisor still has a strong grip on travelers from a trip-planning standpoint, and that's its most-appealing asset. But the landscape is fragmented and there are lots of sites, including search engines, for travel advertisers to consider when establishing their favorite clients.
It was almost a given several years ago that if an online travel agency or hotel wanted to be in the mix and reach consumers, then it had to advertise on TripAdvisor.
But that was before TripAdvisor tried to become a hotel booker while later switching back to classic metasearch referrals, hotels ramped up their direct-booking campaigns, and Google accelerated its push to direct consumers researching hotels in its search engine toward its own comparison service, Google Hotels.
A new comScore study — paid for TripAdvisor — found that 60 percent of travel consumers worldwide who booked trips on prominent websites in a dozen major markets in Europe, Asia, North America and Latin America visited TripAdvisor sites and apps along the way as part of their research process. When considering just U.S. travelers, that number rose to 67 percent.
The comScore study tapped into a panel of more than 2 million people and analyzed the
