Google Unveiled: A Web-Scraping Analysis of U.S. Hotel Distribution – New Skift Research

Our latest Skift Research report delves into the Google Hotels platform through extensive data scraping, using AI-powered Browse.ai and customized Python scripts to amass data from over 5,000 hotel listings in the U.S.

The primary objective was to understand the display mechanisms for hotels on Google, the involvement of online travel agencies, and evaluate whether Google is enabling direct bookings to compete with intermediaries such as Booking and Expedia.

This analysis was driven by Google’s ascent in the booking funnel in recent years, overshadowing other metasearch engines and prompting consideration of its potential disruption of the legacy OTAs. 

The introduction of free organic listings by Google Hotels in March 2021 marked a significant shift, leading to heightened market fragmentation and increased price competition. This has challenged the established duopoly of Booking and Expedia and in turn is seeing a democratization of the online travel marketplace, ripe for new entrants to make their mark.

What You’ll Learn From This Report

• Google’s impact on the hotel distribution landscape, particularly how it is democratizing the OTA market by creating increased competition and disruption to the ranks of long-held market share.
• Unique and proprietary analysis based on web scraping of over 5,000 U.S. hotels across Google…
• …in order to understand how hotels are listed on Google, which OTAs are bidding for bookings and whether Google is aiding direct bookings to compete more head-on with the online intermediaries.

This report focused on U.S. hotel distribution and is Part I of our web-scraping series on Google Travel. In Part II of the series, we will consider a global perspective by comparing key metrics and attributes of U.S. hotel distribution across other regions of the world, such as Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. Stay tuned for more.

A Deep Dive into Google Travel Part I: U.S. Hotel Distribution

In this web scraping exercise of Google Hotels, we consider one of the most interesting questions in the travel industry currently: what role does Google play in the shifting sands of hotel distribution? Google, not one to stay static, is constantly tweaking its hotels platform and we see its latest iteration contributing directly to the democratization of the online travel market and a dis-intermediation of the legacy OTAs in favour of direct bookings.

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