Skift Take
Expedia and Booking.com are wildly successful because they're great at converting travel shoppers into buyers. In order to keep growing, however, they'll need to move further up the "purchase funnel" to capture travelers who are still in the research phase. New search features may be the way to do it.
This week we're talking about search and how it impacts travel purchases.
Online travel agencies like Booking.com and Expedia have become exceedingly efficient at converting shoppers who have reached the "last mile" of their travel purchase process into paying customers. But what about the vast majority of online travel shoppers who are still window shopping or early in their decision-making process? This presents a much more complicated technical problem, even more so now that more searches are happening on mobile devices.
Perhaps the best sign that online booking players are getting serious about the problem is an evolution in how these companies handle customer search queries. Companies like Booking.com and Google are rolling out new search results features in recent months that increasingly try to help customers answer more vague trip planning questions like where to go or w
