Distribution

Consumer love for travel, rising demographics, and exciting innovation square off against unstable geopolitics, affordability challenges, and a lukewarm economic expansion

The future of travel is unfolding now; you just need the right data and insights to see it. The State of Travel report is your essential guide to understanding the trends shaping our industry and staying ahead of the modern traveler as a company, association, or destination.

You have to be at least a little obsessed with Google if you want to understand how the business of travel gets done. New data shows that AI has become dramatically more prevalent in travel search over the last six months, with significant downstream implications for travel brands.

Sluggish recovery in the air distribution business, despite record travel demand, signals a disturbing trend for global distribution systems (GDSs). Without a one-size-fits-all strategy, GDSs should look again at their business models as airlines continue to push for direct bookings.

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.