How Travel Metasearch Lost Its Mojo

02.04.2024 - 07:43 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal

Travel metasearch companies used to be among the hottest things in travel. They enabled consumers to compare hotel or flight prices from multiple vendors at a glance, and many online travel agencies saw the need to acquire one.

In 2012, Booking Holdings (then called the Priceline Group) announced a deal to acquire Kayak and Expedia took a majority stake in Trivago.

In 2016, China’s Ctrip (now called Trip.com Group) agreed to acquire Scotland’s Skyscanner. “We could see their [Skyscanner’s] tremendous growth” in selling airline tickets in Asia, Trip.com Group CEO Jane Jie Sun told Skift at the time. “When the opportunity comes, we move very fast.”

As a rule, metasearch sites don’t sell the majority of the airline tickets or hotel stays on their sites – travelers click over to online travel agencies, hotels or airlines to book them.

But in recent years, the travel metasearch category, or at least some of its leading players, have struggled financially.

In a recent research note, Wells Fargo Securities wrote that it “remains cautious” about two public companies, Tripadvisor and Trivago. It “continues to see travel metasearch challenged as a category, while third party data indicate post-pandemic demand is normalizing.”

Let’s take Tripadvisor as an example. All would acknowledge that Google has eaten into Tripadvisor metasearch’s market share.

In 2023, Tripadvisor hotel metasearch, as captured in its Brand Tripadvisor segment, was still the largest part of Tripadvisor’s business. But its revenue grew just 7% in 2023, compared with 49% growth at Tripadvisor’s Viator tours and activities segment. Brand Tripadvisor, of which hotel metasearch is the largest portion, saw its EBITDA inch up just 1% to $348 million in 2023.

For its part, Trivago notched a net loss of 164.5 million euros (about $176 million in the red) in 2023. On Monday, its shares were trading at less than $3.

In an email exchange, Wells Fargo Managing Director Brian Fitzgerald told Skift that heightened competition from Google Hotels and Flights, which attract users at the beginning of their travel searches, is a major factor weighing on Tripadvisor and Trivago.

Fitzgerald sees other issues, too.

Hotels have been able to attract more direct traffic through their loyalty programs: Many offer lower rates on their websites to loyalty program members than on metasearch sites such as Google, Tripadvisor, Kayak and Trivago.

Online travel agencies such as Booking.com and Expedia have their own loyalty programs, and have at times begun offering stiff discounts to attract their own direct traffic. This hurt metasearch platforms even if online travel agencies owned them.

“Almost everyone in the travel ecosystem came up with a loyalty program in one