Priceline May Be Spending Less on Trivago and Changing Hotel Metasearch Dynamics
Skift Take
Booking.com is pulling back from its advertising spend on Expedia-controlled Trivago. But we must await third-quarter financial data and any company pronouncements on the topic to know all of the implications.
The Priceline Group, which accounted for 43 percent of hotel-search site Trivago's revenue in the first nine months of 2016 — might be pulling back on digital advertising in such hotel-metasearch platforms.
Trivago recently appears to have suffered a relative loss in advertising spend by Priceline Group-owned Booking.com, in particular.
Trivago's share of Booking.com referral of users dropped about 23 percent across its various subdomains, according to Skift's analysis of data from digital analytics firm SimilarWeb.
When you look country-by-country, the pattern varies by market. In August, the flagship Trivago.com site and Trivago's Russian site each sent a third fewer user referrals to Booking.com than they did in July, says the SimilarWeb data.
Yet Trivago's French site only saw a 12 percent decline, and the Italian site only saw a negligible 5 percent decline, month-over-month.
During the same period, TripAdvisor's U.S., British, French, and Russian domains saw double-digit increases in referrals to Booking.com.
A caveat: Like any third-party service without access to Trivago's raw data, SimilarWeb's estimates are rough. But many in the industry consider its data to be valuable in indicating the general direction of trends.
August Surprise
Related to these points, a new survey shows that Priceline brands are not appearing in Trivago search results as prominently as they once did.
Last week, Jake Fuller, a managing director and
