Distribution

A Deep Dive into Google Travel Part II: U.S. vs Europe in 20 Charts

Distribution

A Deep Dive into Google Travel Part II: U.S. vs Europe in 20 Charts

November 2023
14 min read
Pranavi Agarwal

Skift Take

The underlying hotel supply in Europe is much less branded than it is in the U.S., meaning a greater reliance on OTAs for bookings. In turn there is a more fragmented online distribution market in Europe, with Google’s introduction of an organic auction providing further opportunity for smaller OTAs and new entrants to gain market share.

Report Overview

In Part I of our series on Google Travel we analyzed the hotel distribution landscape in the U.S. by web-scraping over 5,000 hotels and their respective distribution offerings across Google’s sponsored and organic auctions. In this Part II of our series, we repeat our efforts across the European hotel market, again web-scraping over 5,000 hotels across 40 European cities in order to compare how the distribution landscape varies in Europe versus the U.S. 

Though both markets are fairly mature with similar levels of online penetration, Europe’s hotel industry differs from the U.S. in three key ways: firstly, its underlying hotel supply is far less branded than the U.S. and instead skews more towards independent hotels; secondly, it’s OTA market is more fragmented with a longer tail of small OTAs competing directly with the likes of Booking and Expedia; and thirdly, there are stricter rules prohibiting price parity clauses in Europe than there are in the U.S. Given these distinctions between the two regions, we compare and analyze the key findings from Part I of the series focussed on the U.S. with the data we have scraped in Europe. We present our analysis and conclusions in 20 key charts. 

What You'll Learn From This Report

  • Unique and proprietary analysis based on web scraping of over 10,000 U.S. and European hotels across Google
  • Understand which OTAs are bidding for bookings on Google's sponsored and organic results in the U.S. vs Europe
  • Understand whether Google Hotels is aiding the shift to direct in Europe, as we saw in the U.S.
  • Evaluating the adherence of price parity rules in Europe vs U.S.
  • A framing of key conclusions by comparing the hotel distribution landscape between the U.S. and Europe - considering the mix of branded vs independent room supply in each region, the market share of OTAs vs direct site and the share of Booking and Expedia vs a long tail of smaller OTAs