Articles tagged “online travel agencies”

Booking sites are prominent throughout the online trip-planning process for U.K. travelers and while they're one of the most used channels for booking, airline and hotel sites become more important when travelers are ready to pull the trigger. Offline travel agents and tour operators are big, too, but not covered by this survey.

TripAdvisor has managed to insert itself into just about every segment of travel. Like an octopus, its tentacles reach wide from accommodations to restaurant reviews. Read this deep dive to understand the company and its importance to the travel ecosystem.

Hotels are beginning to leverage the power of travel agent partners in their conflict with online booking sites.

On hotels' direct-booking rates, one of the major chains is already talking to traditional travel agencies about handing them over. In addition, Choice Hotels, for one, is signaling that better deals from online travel agencies could go a long way toward ending its boycott in distributing loyalty-member rates. If every person has a price, then so indeed do hotel chains.

Expedia is telling hotels that if they "play well" with Expedia it will be very advantageous and the outcomes may not be as positive if hotels decide to rewrite the rules. Many big chains have not appreciated how Expedia has played over the years and they are voting with their proverbial feet.

Many travel and tourism brands are harnessing the power of 360-degree video to inspire travelers, but this is the first time we've seen it used to convert direct bookings. It'll be interesting to see the results of this campaign by the end of this year.

Messaging tech is replacing existing forms of commerce in ways that stand to drive returns at levels the industry has seldom experienced before.

Many cash-strapped independent hoteliers have been relatively laid back and allowed Booking.com to bid on their trademarked names and are even handing over their digital marketing and website creation to Booking.com's BookingSuite division. Given their resource constraints, that's not likely to change in any meaningful way anytime soon.

Although his company has made it a mission to tell customers to book direct, Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta knows he can't afford to overlook other distribution channels, including online travel agencies and travel agents.

This 137-page Skift deck curates data from every sector of travel and provides a wide sweeping overview of the state of the world’s largest sector and the forces driving it today. This is the State of Travel in 2016.