TripAdvisor Hints at Its Growing Interest in Vacation Package Search

TripAdvisor has long offered price-comparison for hotels and flights separately. But the online travel search giant has been showing an increasing interest in offering flight-and-hotel packages as a product in more markets. In a series of job ads, the company has mentioned that it has a plan to "expand the user experience with vacation packages." The telltale language has appeared in ads for engineering positions that the company has posted between April and this month for its Needham, Massachusetts headquarters and an Ottawa, Canada, office. Some of the ads have included the phrase "travel packages" to the boilerplate description of the company as "the world’s leading travel site for reviews and advice on hotels, resorts, flights, vacation rentals, travel packages, and more." The word packages hadn't been part of that descriptive language before on other company materials. A high-level executive familiar with the company's engineering experiments told Skift that TripAdvisor has been testing since last autumn how it might expand its vacation package search — which is typically more complicated given the mix of suppliers and prices that must be displayed. When asked about its ambition in travel packages, a TripAdvisor spokesperson said: "We have been incorporating vacation offerings on TripAdvisor over the last few years, so that isn’t new. It’s part of the comprehensive set of options we want to offer travelers to help them plan and book the perfect trip." "We work w