Hospitality

Luxury travel is evolving to encompass multiple experiential aspects of travel. In order to best capitalize on high demand and supply gaps, luxury hotels can differentiate themselves by broadening their offerings and embracing lucrative emerging experiential trends.

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.

Regenerative tourism represents an opportunity for the industry to respond to clear market demand and develop new approaches to sustainability and innovative business models. But it suffers from a lack of defined methodologies and demonstrable impact.

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.

Asia the new Europe in 2024? As the world gears up for another year of post-pandemic travel, the industry will see Asia take the center stage, driving growth in 2024 while Europe stabilizes at modest growth levels.

Goodbye double-digit growth? Hotel prices soared post-pandemic, but with inflation cooling and travel normalizing, 2024 poses the question: can pricing strength hold? We think so: further demand recovery amidst continued supply constraints should see prices rise above inflation.

2024 will be the year that the travel industry fully transitions from catch-up to true growth above pre-pandemic levels. Without revenge travel as a tailwind we expect a more normal growth trajectory for the travel industry this year.

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.