Hotel Tech Benchmark: Booking Engines, Website Builders, and Direct Booking Tools 2023

Report Overview

Most travel bookings are now made online via mobile phones or websites. Since a vast majority of travelers make travel bookings online, hotels are now reliant on online travel websites for reservations. Listing themselves on popular third-party travel websites helps hotels improve their global visibility and reach. The cost of commissions, however, can be a pain point for hoteliers.

The hotel tech space has consistently evolved, striving to maximize direct bookings by optimizing hotel websites to improve conversion. Website builders, booking engines, and direct booking tools help hotels with their direct booking strategy. While these tools charge less than third-party commissions, they can easily get expensive if not managed properly. Hotels must look at these tools holistically, alongside their marketing strategy. Although direct bookings may save on the commission for each room sold, the overall company economics may look worse if hotels are unable to have enough brand reach to drive sales volumes. Hence, smaller independent hotels still prefer relying on third-party sites over managing bookings themselves.

The new generation of consumers seeks travel experiences and forms opinions based on an organization’s online presence and social media storytelling. Post-millennials are tech-savvy and have very different online booking behavior than what we have seen so far. While hotels have moved towards making their offerings more appealing to the new generation of travelers, we at Skift Research feel that they have been slow in adapting to their booking behavior.

Data in this report is accurate as of March 2023. For the latest updated information, Skift Research subscribers can access our Hotel Tech Benchmark dashboard, updated
periodically as we collect more data from hotel tech vendors.

What You'll Learn From This Report

• Current and future growth potential of Booking Engines, Website Builders, and Direct Booking Tools

• Total market penetration

• Top Vendor market penetration

• Revenue distribution for vendors

• Total market penetration for vendors based on total number of hotels and rooms they service