Online Travel Brands Take No Summer Vacation

Do you remember a few years ago how there was so much talk in online travel about the Booking Holdings–Expedia Group duopoly? How Expedia Group, which owned Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Hotels.com, and Booking, with brands including Booking.com, Kayak, Priceline and Agoda, controlled the hotel market and a whole lot more in travel?

Marketers beware: Prior ways of marketing to Chinese consumers, including travelers, won’t work as well today because their preferences changed during the pandemic.

The old boys network in online travel — yes, let’s call it what it is — has reunited again to accomplish a formidable goal that has frustrated numerous startups in the past. The aim is to disrupt online cruise booking.

In an effort to combat the hold that online travel agencies have on the hotel market, Trivago is focusing on building a capability for direct access between hotels and travelers. 

Mondee is scooping up Brazilian online travel marketplace Orinter for $40 million, its first acquisition since going public last year, the company said Wednesday.

The longtime business models of online travel companies ranging from Airbnb to Expedia and Booking.com are getting increased scrutiny from the media and short-term rental hosts because these companies hold onto customer funds, and invest them for profits before disbursing them, sometimes months later.

Exoticca, a Barcelona-based online travel agency focused on affordable luxury tours and vacation packages, launched its first-ever brand campaign this year. The campaign, titled What a Time to be Alive, debuted in early January with TV spots in Canada and the United Kingdom and digital ads in the United States, Mexico and Spain.

It’s another earnings season so online travel companies such as Airbnb, Expedia and Tripadvisor occasionally present facts in a misleading — or at least in an exceedingly positive-sounding — way.

Travel metasearch sites such as Trivago and Tripadvisor fell considerably short of pre-pandemic 2019 revenue levels in 2022 while travel companies in other sectors, such as Airbnb in short-term rentals, and tours and activities provider Viator greatly exceeded their marks from three years ago.

Skift Research’s latest report looks at how online travel booking habits changed during the pandemic and how these behaviors will continue to evolve. Since February 2020, Skift has been regularly surveying 1,000-plus Americans about their travel behaviors first on a monthly, and then a bi-monthly basis. The topline results of these surveys are published as our U.S. Travel Tracker. However, we ask more granular travel questions that have not been published previously. 

While the tech sector faces the blues, the travel sector is still moving in a positive direction. You can see this in the last month of earnings reports, as well as from exclusive Skift Research surveys. Although not fully recovered completely, the travel industry gained substantial momentum at the start of the year. All regions have almost recovered from the pandemic blues, Asia Pacific being the only exception. But with loosening travel restrictions and China reopening, we expect a stronger travel industry to be less uneven this year.

Online travel agency Wheel the World, which serves travelers with disabilities, announced on Thursday that it’s offering guaranteed accessibility and price match for hotel rooms booked on its website.