Articles tagged “online travel agencies”

Priceline’s growth over the past decade is nothing short of remarkable. In this report, we answer, a simple, but important question — Where do we go from here?

HotelTonight's pivot into a 100-day booking window is a concession that the last-minute market was too small. Yet the company's swing to profitability is remarkable.

It's not a tsunami, but it's been clear for some time that the tides are turning: Skift's data show 23 percent of U.S. consumers who booked a hotel in the past year used a smartphone to do so. The waters – or mobile hotel bookings – will only keep rising.

Now that Hostelworld has largely finished integrating Hostelbookers, it can turn its attention to developing features that would make it more relevant to users during their travels. None of the initiatives are exactly game-changing, but what the company is hoping is that it will make travelers more likely to click on its app rather than that of a competitor.

Follow the money — at your own risk, of course. These two hedge funds are putting their money in airline and online travel agency stocks, often investing in competitors. Rising tides lift all boats, after all.

TripAdvisor is still a must-have marketing channel for online travel agency and hotel advertisers. But if the Priceline Group and Expedia tilt their spend more toward other marketing vehicles, there aren't a lot of other players with the marketing resources they have to make TripAdvisor whole.

Expedia doesn't really care about the noise coming from some disgruntled vacation rental owners. The company is focused on scaling HomeAway's vacation rental business, and having online bookable properties is the formula for the future.

Maybe it really is better to keep clicking around if you're hoping to save money (and you don't want to be a member of a hotel loyalty program).

Where online travel agencies make it easy for guests to book hotel rooms from their smartphones, hotels need to do a much better job if they want more direct bookings. And they need to make better apps while they're at it.

As their contract expiration deadline looms, Hyatt and Expedia are maneuvering for position with Hyatt property owners. The new Hyatt-Booking.com agreement gives Hyatt some leverage but it likely wouldn't fully make up all the ground if the chain goes completely dark on Expedia.