Expedia's Trivago Follows Booking.com Into the Business Side of the Hotel Industry
Skift Take
While the big chains have tech and marketing people to optimize websites and their cost-per click campaigns, booking sites in transformation such as Booking.com, Trivago and TripAdvisor are squarely directed at making themselves more essential to smaller, independent hotels. It is another sign of the changing role of metasearch sites and online travel agencies in the mobile era.
A new Trivago program, which it calls Trivago Direct Connect, highlights the ongoing transformation of online travel agencies and metasearch sites.
While price-comparison platforms such as TripAdvisor and Google are busy turning themselves into hotel (TripAdvisor) or hotel and flight (Google) booking sites, online travel agencies such as Booking.com and now Expedia, through its Trivago unit, are getting into the business-to-business side of the hotel industry by offering hotels booking engines and website help, as well as search engine marketing tools.
TripAdvisor, too, has created a dashboard for hotel partners, offering analytics about the performance of their marketing campaigns.
Trivago, a unit of Expedia Inc., is offering hotels customizable booking engines to improve
