Distribution

If 2023 was the year of revenge travel, and 2024 of normalization, what will 2025 bring? Likely a slow and steady baseline of growth amid divergence, challenges, and change.

By 2030, direct digital bookings will dominate hotel distribution, generating over $400 billion of hotel gross bookings — overtaking the online travel agencies which are expected to bring in a smaller $333 billion of hotel bookings.

Our biggest report of the year with 350+ insights. Understand the consumer, business, and investment trends defining the state of travel in 2024. Our goal was to create a chart for any major travel question you may have.

We undertook a unique web scraping exercise of over 20,000 hotels listed on Google Hotels across the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa in order to understand today’s online hotel distribution landscape.

The golden era of Booking and Expedia is facing challenges of slowing growth and increased competition, prompting a fierce battle for market share through innovation and expansion efforts amid a changing landscape.

The noticeable acceleration in the implementation of distribution changes in recent years has placed airlines in a favorable position, granting them greater autonomy over their inventory and reducing their reliance on Travel Management Companies (TMCs) compared to the past. This change in dynamics will prove consequential as more airlines move towards direct distribution.

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.

In this web scraping exercise of Google Hotels, we consider one of the most interesting questions in the travel industry currently: what role does Google play in the shifting sands of hotel distribution? Google, not one to stay static, is constantly tweaking its hotels platform and we see its latest iteration contributing directly to the democratization of the online travel market and a dis-intermediation of the legacy OTAs in favour of direct bookings.

The new year will give no rest to a weary travel industry. After years of work to dig out of the hole the pandemic put us in, travel in 2023 may find that the hardest part still lies ahead. The groundwork for growth is in place but achieving success will be no simple task.

The metasearch wars are drawing to a close and Google is winning. The future of independent travel metasearch in the U.S. and Europe is at risk, in our view.

With 2022 on the horizon, the travel recovery has begun in earnest. Brands are competing to win returning consumers but may find that old habits and preferences have evolved.

Anyone seeking to understand leisure travel overlooks tour operators at their own risk. It is one of the last great offline sectors in the travel industry but that cannot last. Changing consumer behavior and new tech is driving disruption in these businesses, the effects of which have only been compounded by the significant impact of COVID-19.