Skift Take
Expedia and Booking.com, which each doubled Marriott's TV advertising spend over the last year, are still growing like weeds despite hotels' direct-booking campaigns. That makes for a tough environment for hoteliers, although some brands will do better than others.
Editor's Note: In July, Hitwise provided Skift with online travel agency and hotel market share data as of May 2017 that Hitwise now concedes was flawed. Hitwise recently provided us with updated data that purport to show the online travel agencies actually gained more share (2.96 percent compared with a 1.16 percent gain, as previously reported), and hotel share fell more (3.87 percent versus 2.55 percent).
In addition, the revised HItwise data show the gap in online travel agency versus hotel market share tallies (58.28 percent versus 41.72 percent, respectively) was narrower than initially reported below.
Even the new Hitwise data, though, is incomplete because it does not capture all the bookings for Starwood brands, but merely tracks bookings through Starwoodhotels.com, for example. Finally, as previously noted, the Hitwise data does not record in-app bookings or corporate bookings completed through private servers.
The original post follows:
With all the hoopla over hotel-direct bookings and online travel agency retaliation and maneuvering, the balance of power in U.S. market share among top players has been surprisingly even-keeled over the last year with overall share shifts amounting to less than one percentage point up or down for each sector.
From May 2016 to May 2017, according to new bookings data from Hitwise, hotels' market share of all online bookings in the U.S. fell from 31.36 percent to 30.56 percent, or less than a percentage point, while online travel agencies picked up a corresponding amount, seeing their market share of hotel bookings rise to 69.44 percent, up a bit from 68.64 percent a year earlier.
"To be honest the shift in share of bookings for hotels versus OTAs is quite small, less than one percentage point change for either camp," said Rochelle Bailis, Hitwise's global director of content. "Hotels have lost about .8 percentage points of overall hotel bookings year over year."
To get its numbers, Hitwise uses a panel of 8 million U.S. consumers and tallies their online hotel bookings by enabling rules to track their visits to specific booking-confirmation pages.
If Hitwise's numbers are to be believed, it doesn't mean that Marriott, Choice Hotels or Hilton, which have been the heaviest hotel advertisers on U.S. TV in the 12 months through May 2017, according to iSpot.tv, aren't attracting more direct bookings and stealing some from Expedia, as they have reported.
Reacting to the Hitwise numbers, Bjo
