Trivago and Tripadvisor Metasearch Lag Online Travel Agency Pandemic Recovery

25.08.2023 - 14:08 / skift.com / Steve Hafner / United Airlines / Dennis Schaal

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.

The following chart shows that Trivago reached only 64 percent of 2019 revenue last year while Tripadvisor’s hotel metasearch feature climbed to just 85 percent of pre-pandemic revenue numbers in 2022. In the hotel sector, Marriott came up just short of the mark, having achieved 99 percent of 2019 revenue last year.

 Source:

Airbnb; Viator, which is part of Tripadvisor; United, and Expedia Group all surpassed their 2019 revenue numbers last year. In 2022, Airbnb and Viator exceeded their prepandemic top lines by 75 percent and 71 percent, respectively. United (up 4 percent) and Expedia (2 percent) inched ahead. Expedia might have been a tad further ahead of 2019 if it hadn't sold its corporate travel unit, Egencia, which generated $620 million in revenue that year, to American Express Global Business Travel in November 2021.

Booking Holdings hasn't reported its fourth quarter and full-year 2022 numbers yet, but in the third quarter of 2022 it blew past the revenue amount it recorded three years earlier by 21 percent. So one would expect Booking to show that it recovered considerably faster than rival Expedia when Booking publishes its 2022 financials on Thursday.

What are travel metasearch sites? In general, they are websites where online travel agencies and hotels can bid for placement within a hotel listing, for example, and consumers can view their rates on a given date range, and then click over to these online travel agency and hotel websites to complete their bookings. Google, for one, supplements paid booking links from advertisers with free links from hotels and online travel agencies. Online travel agencies are the largest advertisers in metasearch compared with hotels, use these sites as an important vehicle to market their hotel offerings, and pay them each time a traveler clicks on one of their links.

The following is a Tripadvisor metasearch listing for a stay at the Ibis Madrid Calle Alcala hotel on the night of February 24. Expedia likely bid the most for the featured position, and there are about 16 other deals displayed, all from online travel agencies with the exception of one hotel, Ibis. (Notice that in this instance all of the nightly rates are within $1 of one another.)

Kayak co-founder and CEO Steve Hafner, whose metasearch company is part of Booking Holdings, said of Trivago and Tripadvisor: "They definitely lag the big OTAs (online travel agencies) but that mainly reflects their desire