Can Tripadvisor’s Grand Strategy Experiment Set It Apart?

Online Travel This Week

It’s a major online travel conundrum: How do you differentiate your business when there is so much sameness and a blending of everything going around?

And, in the case of Tripadvisor, this challenge becomes acute when Google’s inroads in hotels primarily, and emerging footprint in experiences and restaurant reservations, are causing much pain.

In this regard, it was somewhat shocking to hear Tripadvisor CEO Steve Kaufer, speaking at Skift Forum Asia last week, advise attendees that if someone is looking to book a 10-day packaged tour to the United States or a routine weekend stay not too far from home, then they can happily book elsewhere.

“That’s not our audience,” Kaufer said, referring to travelers looking to book run-of-the-mill packaged tours. “Our audience is someone who’s really looking to experience another country, almost the way locals might or any independent traveler would.”

In other words, as Kaufer told it, Tripadvisor is going after travelers who want to book something special and memorable, and the aim is to cross-sell them to book their entire trips on Tripadvisor. Over the years, Kaufer has variously called this type of journey the “perfect trip,” and lately, “the considered trip.”

When detailing the differences between its Viator tours and activities brand, and Tripadvisor, which likewise offers things to do, Kaufer said: “Hey I want to plan my whole trip. I need a hotel, I need restaurants and things to do, Tripadvisor’s clearly where you are going to go. Viator does only a small fraction of that. Expedia, Booking and other sites only do a fraction of that picture. So go to Tripadvisor. We want to make it compelling that that traveler goes to Tripadvisor.”

Complexities

There are some difficulties with trying to get people to book their entire trips on Tripadvisor. For example, what Kaufer really means is to get hotel bookers to add experiences and restaurants to their itineraries. After all, most people in pre-Covid days tended to start there trip-planning with flight bookings. Tripadvisor indeed offers flight metasearch, but it isn’t a core feature.

And most travelers who find a hotel through Tripadvisor get sent to an online travel agency such as Hotels.com or eDreams to complete the booking so any comprehensive trip planning and booking on Tripadvisor would be a choppy endeavor at best.

Tripadvisor is counting on back-end technology in the form of customer relationship management and retargeting efforts to execute on its whole-trip strategy, and to increase its repeat visitor numbers.

Kaufer has spoken candidly in the past few months that the strategy twist means emphasizing “the considered trip” at the cost of reduced emphasis on improving things such as page optimization, booking flow, or flight search.

“We have about 400 million users a month across our brands, but I need to set the expectation that if that [traffic] numbers drop, that’s OK with us if the repeat rate or the number of people coming back goes up,” he said in June.

Revenue Diversification

Give Tripadvisor credit for trying to reinvent its business and diversify its revenue streams away from hotels, where competition is so intense. The company lately has been digging deeper into business-to-business services, including in subscriptions, and going after non-travel advertising.

But I’m skeptical about whether price-conscious and bargain-seeking consumers, which are the staple for companies such as Tripadvisor, will really return again and again to Tripadvisor, and come to view it as the preferred option to book an entire trip.

And is booking that so-called special trip on Tripadvisor — especially when the company is emphasizing mass-tourism attractions such as Hong Kong Disneyland or Vatican tours — really a compelling prospect or even a big enough slice of the market to make a difference?

In Brief

Longtime Coming — U.S. and States Sue Google

It’s interesting that on Tuesday, the day the U.S. Department of Justice and 11 states sued Google on antitrust grounds, a development that a big chunk of the travel industry has long awaited, Google’s stock price rose 1.89 percent. You can read that to mean that the legal wrangling will be long and extensive, and the outcome very uncertain. Skift

The Airbnb Versus Hotels Fallacy

Skift Research’s Seth Borko rips apart the Professor Scott Galloway rant that Airbnb is a truly global hospitality brand, poised to obliterate global hotel chains. Hint: Airbnb is closer to being a Booking.com than it is to cloning Marriott. Sorry, professor. Skift

Oyo’s Room Count Fell 16 Percent to 1 Million

Oyo CEO Ritesh Agarwal said the company’s biggest pandemic-driven setback has been in China, which was its largest market after its home base of India. Globally, the the room count of the budget chain and online seller declined about 16 percent to 1 million rooms since the beginning of 2020. Mint

Airbnb Changes Enhanced Cleaning From Optional to Mandatory

Airbnb set a deadline of November 20 for hosts to agree to adopt its enhanced cleaning procedures for rentals, or risk getting booted off the platform. Hosts previously could opt for a less-rigorous approach but had to implement a 72-hour waiting period between stays. The problem with the enhanced protocols is there are no real enforcement mechanisms. It’s nice-appearing for an IPO, however. Airbnb

Indonesia’s Traveloka Thinks It’s Back From the Brink

It’s always hard to gauge profitability in a privately held company, but Indonesia-based Traveloka said it would transition next year into the black, all the way back from Covid-tinged bookings close to zero in April and May. Skift