Skift Take
Many hotel groups are directing more of their ad budgets toward price-comparison search sites. That's a boon for vendors providing connectivity and automation services. But it's also a welcome, if still modest, injection for metasearch players like Trivago that have recently been struggling.
Nicholas Ward champions a contrarian take on hotel price-comparison search. Metasearch brands aren't seen as hot today. But the president and co-founder of tech vendor Koddi argues that some major hotel groups are shifting budgets into metasearch at faster rates than ever.
The view is somewhat surprising. Online travel agencies continue to dominate overall advertising spend in metasearch. Hotel companies still generate only a minority share of the ad buys on Kayak, Skyscanner, TripAdvisor, Trivago, Qunar, and Wego, experts said. A multi-year pullback in spending by online travel agencies like Booking.com has put the hotel metasearch model in trouble, as Skift has reported.
But if you focus on hotel companies, a parallel trend seems to be emerging.
Ward argues that significant hotel chains continue to shift their marketing spending into search advertisements on metasearch channels — and often especially Google's hotel price-comparison search.
Ward isn't alone in his thinking. Several vendors we spoke with said they've seen a rise in the number of hotel companies making use of their connections to metasearch.
For instance, DerbySoft said that metasearch ad spending on its platform by hotel companies is on average up 34 percent, year-over-year.
"We continue to see strong shifts of ad spend into the metasearch channel as a category," said Ken Nishizu, vice president and general manager of marketing services at DerbySoft.
"Organic growth in traffic to metasearch channels and the ever-evolving ability to manipulat
