Online Travel

The tours and experiences space is rapidly evolving in an altered post-COVID-19 market, driven by desires for authenticity, immersion, and “experiencing like a local”. Not only is this a major opportunity for tour operators and travel agents, but experiences also drive extension of trips, presenting opportunities for the accommodation and other travel sub-sectors as well.

Direct bookings are surging, reshaping competition and requiring both OTAs and suppliers to precisely target and understand traveler preferences.

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 present a handy chart factbook comparing the two largest global OTAs: Booking Holdings and Expedia Group. In 50 charts, we compare the key financial metrics and performance indicators - including share price movement and valuation - of the two companies.

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.

India’s travel booking landscape is rapidly shifting online, driven by the younger demographic, rising smartphone penetration, and improving internet connectivity across the country. Currently diverse and fragmented, the online travel landscape, is poised for dynamic growth as local players strive to maintain their dominance and Western OTAs take steps to tap into the emerging opportunity.

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.

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.

We attempt to tell you everything you'd want to know about the Airbnb - Vrbo rivalry in 20 charts... Sadly we failed, and give you 23 charts instead. As a bonus we sprinkle in some Booking.com analysis too, data permitting.

The tours, activities & experiences market is a lucrative and underexplored opportunity in the travel industry. Its high fragmentation, influx of small suppliers, and rapid shift from offline to online makes it a goldmine for online intermediaries to gain market share from traditional offline players.