Skift Take
Private equity firm Certares is leveraging its brand assets the way a Booking Holdings might do when Booking.com shares inventory with sister company Priceline. This isn't the usual private equity playbook.
Tripadvisor acknowledges that it is building its new subscription program, Tripadvisor Plus, with wholesale rates from "aggregators" — that it refuses to identify — covering 100,000 hotels. Skift has learned, however, that most of these hotel discounts and perks are coming from an unconventional source — travel agency brands within private equity firm Certares' portfolio.
Travel agencies within Certares' wide array of travel holdings are providing Tripadvisor with the bulk of the wholesale hotel inventory, according to a source close to Tripadvisor.
That's a twist on standard industry practice on several fronts. Hotels regularly give wholesale rates to traditional travel agencies, including discounts and perks, and not with the expectation that these traditional travel agencies will pass the inventory along to online travel companies for use in standalone hotel sales. One would have also thought that Tripadvisor would turn to bed banks to scale its wholesale program, and not offline travel agencies.
In addition, it is atypical in travel for a private equity firm to share its assets in the way Certares is doing it.
Tripadvisor's sales force has also started to sign direct contracts with hotels for wholesale inventory.
The source close to Tripadvisor did not identify which Certares-affiliated brands
