The Travel Industry Needs a New Way to Read OTA Results
Photo Credit: Travel demand has typically been used to represent growth for OTAs. Skift
Skift Take
OTAs posted double-digit growth in the latest earnings cycle even as consumer travel spending declined. The industry needs a new framework for reading these results — and the signals that actually matter.
Last month, I posed a question: Have OTAs stopped being a reliable proxy for travel demand?
I pointed to credit-card data showing near-zero correlation between consumer travel spending and OTA gross bookings. The R² values were striking: 0.03 for Booking, 0.11 for Expedia, and 0.02 for Airbnb. Those low values mean that consumer travel spending explained almost none of the movement in OTA results over the past three years.
So I set up a test for the latest earnings cycle: We know consumer travel spending was soft and if OTAs reported strong gross bookings anyway, it would confirm the decorrelation thesis — essentially that OTA growth is coming from share gains and monetization mechanics, not demand tailwinds.
Well, the earnings are in, and the thesis is confirmed.
The ResultsThe top OTAs reported strong gross bookings growth: Booking Holdings and Airbnb both posted 16% increases — Airbnb's strongest quarter in more than two years
