Skift Take
While TripAdvisor Instant Booking has become pervasive on its sites, success isn't assured. Ultimately, it will be up to consumers decide if TripAdvisor is the place they want to book their travel.
TripAdvisor stated several months ago that after it implements its booking partnership with Booking.com and sister companies Priceline.com and Agoda then more than half -- 56 percent -- of the hotels displayed on TripAdvisor sites would be able to be booked right there through its Instant Booking feature instead of forcing travelers to navigate to third-party sites metasearch-style.
Over the last four months, financial firm PiperJaffray studied the extensiveness and progress of TripAdvisor Instant Booking, and found that when it comes to the most popular hotels in the most important markets, TripAdvisor in December could handle the bookings on 92 percent of them, up from 76 percent in September 2015.
PiperJaffray reached this tally by analyzing 500 hotels on TripAdvisor, namely the top five online bookable hotels in the top 100 markets in September and then December 2015, and attributed the increased coverage largely to implementation of the TripAdvisor-Booking.com partnership, w