Skift Take
TripAdvisor is getting more sophisticated about prodding customers to book hotels on TripAdvisor or to more effectively refer them to partner sites. In an apparently modified strategy, TripAdvisor is finding religion in being agnostic about where its users book hotels.
Is TripAdvisor, with its Instant Booking push, trying to become primarily a place where you can complete a hotel booking without leaving the site or one that refers you to a third-party website for the transaction?
The answer increasingly is: It depends who the customers is.
After many months of experimentation that's ongoing, TripAdvisor may be hitting its stride as it is increasingly personalizing the hotel-search results a consumer sees depending on factors such as users' search patterns regarding hotel rates, types of hotels, and whether they booked hotels on TripAdvisor before or mostly clicked on a link to navigate to an online travel agency or hotel site.
Meanwhile, InterContinental Hotels Group, and TripAdvisor announced today that IHG would be joining TripAdvisor Instant Booking. With nearly 5,200 properties, all of IHG's brands, ranging from InterContinental to Kimpton and Crowne Plaza to Holiday Inn, will be participating.
TripAdvisor Instant Booking launched in the U.S. in August 2015, and has expanded globally, but IHG was the most notable big hotel chain that hadn't signed up until now. In the interim, Marriott, Starwood, Hilton, Accor, Best Western, Wyndham, Hyatt, and La Quinta had all signed on.
IHG had been boycotting TripAdvisor Instant Booking until now as it preferred to emphasize its direct-booking strategy but has been convinced to participate.
We're primarily a booking Site, no we're Mostly a search site
On TripAdvisor today, it appears that changes in its hotel search algorithms have moved the site away from an earlier approach when it seemed to be giving preference at times to its own Instant Booking, or Book on TripAdvisor, feature over metasearch and its links to partners.
"In the event of a [pricing] tie between Instant Book and meta, we will take into consideration what we know about the user to determine what is preferenced in the View Deal results," said TripAdvisor spokesman Brian Hoyt. "We look at a n
