Travel & Hotel Meta Search
Trends & Innovation
Hamutal Schieber and Ruth Lewin-Chen, January 2018

Introduction
• Meta-search engines provide consumers a time-saving solution
for searching for the best deal, through aggregation of multiple
hotel, flight and other travel sources into one website.
• Traditionally, meta-search engines received commissions from
hotels, but today, some competitors pursuit the OTA (online
travel agency) model of direct booking.
• Price comparisons were the initial driver for the industry, but
today, competitors move beyond price, to add value through
content, personalization and service, but above all – reviews.
“Aggregation, aggregators, and meta have become huge… Users (are)
no longer going just to one place and expecting to get the best price”.
(HotelTonight on Why Last-Minute Bookings Are the Way to Go
PCMag.com August 1, 2017)

The Travel Market and Purchase Funnel
• Meta-search engines are usually “top of funnel”, while OTA’s are
further down the funnel.
Online search, social media and marketplace
companies: Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu,
Facebook, Alibaba, and Amazon.
Hotel metasearch providers: Trivago, Kayak,
Ctrip.com International, Ltd., and
HotelsCombined
OTAs: Expedia, Inc., The Priceline Group, Inc. and
their subsidiaries, Tripadvisor.
Global hotel chains seeking to promote direct
bookings, boutique hotels, apartment rentals
Awareness
Interest
Action
• Priceline says it recognizes a trend to move up the funnel through
Google search strategy, reviews and content creation, while up the funnel
companies try to drive economics by moving down the funnel, e.g.
TripAdvisor with Instant Booking, to monetize the traffic.

The Travel Market and Purchase Funnel
• TripAdvisor demonstrates key success factors along the shopper’s journey:

Top of Funnel: Key Success Factors
Content
• Reviews
• Mobile
• Video
• Local
language
Data
• Social media
• Search
• Personalized
offers
Awareness
• advertising
• CRM
• WoM

Top of Funnel: Awareness
• Global search volumes for main OTA and meta-search competitors,
last 12 months (taken on Feb, 2018)

Top of Funnel: Awareness
• Interest by region:

Top of Funnel: Awareness
• Statista checked the usage popularity of different platforms by US travelers,
used in order to compare fares.
• Expedia, tripadvisor, orbitz, priceline and kayak who were ranked at the top 5
by familiarity are also leading by usage.

Top of Funnel: Awareness
• Resources travelers used when selecting vacation accommodation worldwide
in 2016, by age (Statista)
52%
60%
54% 55%
47%
45%
36%
45%
30%
25%
20%
26%
23% 22%
16%
21%
19%
15%
11%
16%
0.0%
10.0%
20.0%
30.0%
40.0%
50.0%
60.0%
70.0%
18-34 35-54 55+ Global
Shareofrespondents
Age
TripAdvisor Online travel agent Word-of-mouth Other travel review sites Content posted by friends/family
Source: TripAdvisor; Ipsos: Worldwide; June 21 to July 8 2016; 18 years and older; 36,444

Data at the Top of the Funnel
• One of the most important trends in the meta search industry is the availability of data
in the hands of Facebook, Baidu, Google, Apple, Alibaba, Amazon and others. This can
enable these competitors to leverage search, mobile and other aspects.
• Google has entered various aspects of the online travel market, including by establishing a
flight meta-search product (“Google Flights”) and a hotel meta-search business ("Hotel
Ads") that are growing rapidly, as well as its "Book on Google" reservation functionality.

Content at the Top of the Funnel
• Momondo, acquired by the Priceline Group, uses dynamic content to drive
additional conversions.

Industry Consolidation
• The digital travel industry experiences high consolidation rates.
– One of the leading groups is Expedia.com, a leading full service online travel
company with localized sites in 33 countries and the parent company of hotels.com,
Orbitz, Expedia, Trivago, HomeAway, Egencia and Travelocity.
– TripAdvisor, in addition to the flagship TripAdvisor brand, manages and operates
23 other travel media brands.
• In 2017, new markets, and deeper penetration into the flight meta-search business,
seem to be the motivations for M&A activity.
– Priceline Group (owner of Kayak) in July 2017 paid about $550m of international
cash to close Momondo acquisition. The company expects the acquisition to have
materially accretive impact to KAYAK's results and to help KAYAK accelerate its
international growth and build its scale in the meta-search channel.
– Ctrip, a Chinese travel company, acquired SkyScanner, to gain foothold in Europe.

Expansion of Services
• Meta-search engines move from offering only hotels or flights, to offering
both, and many went on to offer attractions, car rentals and other services.
• However, it seems that most of the traditional hotel meta-search players are
yet to find success from products beyond hotels.
• A Statista survey that was
conducted on April 2017 found
that 73% of travelers in the USA,
book flights through airline
websites, followed by 59% who
use online travel agencies.
• Far behind, 27% of travelers use
meta search engines such as
skyscanner.com and 15% book
through brick and mortar travel
agencies.

Monetization Strategies: TripAdvisor
• TripAdvisor says many people are just “looking around” and not ready to
book; and the challenge is to monetize these people.
Source: Liberty Interactive Corp Investor Meeting - Final
FD (Fair Disclosure) Wire November 16, 2017;
TripAdvisor
“570 million reviews, an enormous
amount of flow. And shame on us, if
we can't find a way to monetize that.”
GREGORY B. MAFFEI, Liberty Media

Monetization Strategies: TripAdvisor
• Currently, the company has 2
monetization strategies for “middle
of the funnel” visitors: CPM
(>$100mn business) and Hotel
Business Listing Subscriptions (also
> $100mn). Other initiatives include
a new discovery product for
restaurants - TripAdvisor Ads. And
so, in order to appear on the 1st
page of TripAdvisor, a restaurant
owner can either build a better
reputation – or buy a click to the
restaurant page.
• The company plans to do the same
for hotels.

Monetization Strategies: TripAdvisor
• “Instant booking is a minority of our total auction revenues. So meta is still by far the
larger revenue stream.”
• In addition to offering Instant Booking, TripAdvisor has expanded into non-hotel
segment offering.

Monetization Strategies: Priceline
• Priceline, which is an OTA, sees its
comprehensive inventory as a
competitive advantage, which would
be hard for meta-search sites to
achieve. The company notes that in
markets outside of the USA, the
company’s share of independent hotels
is very high.
• Priceline considers meta-search to be
the most convenient way for
consumers to search for travel
products. The company competes with
TripAdvisor and Trivago directly,
through Kayak and now, Momondo.
• It also have a strategic partnership with
Ctrip, the #1 online travel company in
China.
9.48
16.91
23.37
33.3
43.64
47.97
58.64
4.17
4.75
5.09
5.87
6.66
7.56
9.45
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
GrossbookingsinbillionU.S.
dollars
International Domestic
Gross bookings of Priceline Group worldwide from
2010 to 2016, by region (in billion $ U.S.)
Revenue of Priceline Group worldwide from 2007 to 2016
(in billion U.S. dollars)
1.41
1.88
2.34
3.08
4.36
5.26
6.79
8.44
9.22
10.74
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
RevenueinbillionU.S.dollars

Monetization Strategies: Kayak
• Kayak offers “compare vs. Kayak” to encourage travelers not to leave the site,
and drive them further down the funnel.

Monetization Strategy: Kayak
• KAYAK derives revenues from sending referrals to OTCs and travel service
providers and from advertising placements on its websites and mobile apps.
KAYAK offers its services in approximately 40 countries, with the United States
being its largest market.

Monetization Strategy: Lastminute.com
• Lastminute.com opened a media business called “The Travel People”, aiming to become
“a publisher, rather than a brand”. The company’s OTA sites across Europe work as
content hubs, around the concept of “Travel People”. Video content is a special focus
for the internal hubs.
• While Lastminute.com will develop slightly different "personalities" in different countries
through microsites, these will all tie in to the brand's main strategy.
• The company also acquired Hotelscan, to broaden its offering by adding more
accommodation providers. Its main brand Jetcost, is primarily focused on flights.

Mobile Strategy
• Mobile is rising as part of the seamless digital
experience. “Many, many consumers are going back
and forth, back and forth. They look on their mobile,
and then they go home, they use their desktop”
(Glenn Fogel, CEO, Priceline)
Momondo (part of the Priceline
Group) mobile apps for flights
Priceline’s apps, including a
smart watch app

Mobile Strategy
• TripAdvisor is driving conversion on mobile. In Q3 2017 “we were close to
50% growth in our revenue from phone”, said Stephen Kaufer, President and
CEO.

Customer Service
• Companies find that, despite the buzz around AI and bots, people still want to
talk to a real person.
• HotelTonight has automated a
concierge service for its guests in
major markets: HT Pro. “The pro can
help you with everything from 'tell me
the cool coffee shop,' to 'where do I
want to go for dinner,' to 'can you just
call the hotel and make sure
housekeeping comes,' or 'can you get
me more towels.' And it's all just a chat
interface.”

Voice & Artificial Intelligence
• SnapTravel aims to find you a hotel based on your budget and preferences via SMS,
Facebook Messenger or Slack. It uses a combination of artificial and human intelligence
to search Expedia, Priceline and more than 100 other sites for the best deal, and claims
to have “secret deals” of its own. The chat also enables speaking to a real human.
• Google uses AI to recommend better deals for hotels and flights.

Voice & Artificial Intelligence
• Skyscanner’s Cortana skill includes the ability to ask about indicative pricing on any
flight route, in addition to the best time to book routes, and live flight status
information.
• Skyscanner has become a pioneer in the bots and conversational search space, having
been among the first to launch chat bots on both Facebook’s Messenger platform and
Skype, as well as on Amazon’s Alexa voice service (in 2016).

Hotel Relationships
Tools
• Management
tools
Marketing
• Advertising and
raising
awareness to
the brand
Revenue
• Driving revenue
to hotels

Hotel Tools
• Trivago, Priceline, Tripadvisor and Expedia all offer hotel management tools,
to deepen their ties with hotel partners as well as to drive revenue. Tripadvisor
offers a “Storyboard” function for “attention grabbing” presentation.
https://www.trivago.com/hotelmanager/

Meta Search Key Success Factors
Convenience
• Mobile apps
• Global aggregation
of real-time hotel /
flight supply
• Tailored hotel/
flight/ attraction
search functions
• Wide selection of
both chains and
independent hotels
/ attractions
• Service – inc. chats,
AI, Voice
Price
• Transparent price
comparison
• Best price
guarantee
• Price alerts
Content
• Verified reviews
• Easy to use
information
• Expert content
• Personalization
• Ongoing content
marketing
Hotelier /
Restaurateur Tools
• Advertising options
• Profile
management and
enhancement
• Ability to add
dynamic / video
profiles
• Data and
intelligence

Thank You!
The research was conducted by: Ruth Lewin Chen, Hamutal Schieber
Schieber Research | Market Research & Competitive Intelligence
www.researchci.com | hamutal@researchci.com
More articles and researches on Carmelon Digital
Marketing website:
http://www.carmelon-digital.com