Skift Take
Online travel agencies will be around a decade from now, but food, activities, and rides will be a lot more important to them and their customers. The saplings of this future growth are already visible in 2019.
The online travel agency business over the last couple of decades has largely been built around selling hotel stays. But in 2019, there will undoubtedly be an acceleration of the drive to diversify their core businesses not only into apartments and vacation rentals, but also into tours and activities, restaurants, food delivery, and ridesharing.
The online travel agency future is wide open. Although it has more to do with marketing and business models than products, just consider that Booking Holdings over the last year and a half reversed long-standing practices and leaned into brand advertising instead of paid ads on search engines, and accelerated its use of the prepay merchant model over its mainstay pay-at-the-hotel agency model.
So anything can happen.
But back to the subject at hand, which is the diversification of online travel agency business lines, TripAdvisor has been a leader in the march away from hotels, which however is still its main business at 73 percent of revenue in the 12 months ending September 30. In the same period, TripAdvisor’s revenue from its non-hotel segment — experiences, restaurants, and home rentals — jumped 80.8 percent to $429 million compared with the year-earlier period.
And during the most recent 12-month period, the late
