13th November 2024: Here are some of the stories that caught our attention over the week with some of our takeaways.
Global travel has reached new record high levels in 2024 according to latest estimates: WTM Global Travel Report “Many analysts have been tracking progress relative to 2019 as a pre-pandemic benchmark. International arrivals worldwide are now set to surpass that benchmark, with 1.5 billion overnight arrivals expected this year.”
The Ideal Mix For Hotel Distribution: Direct Bookings to Lead by 2030: Skift Research “Online travel agencies still account for the largest share of hotel gross bookings – but that’s changing fast, Skift Research shows in Hotel Distribution Outlook 2024. We predict that by 2030, direct digital channels will have overtaken the OTAs as the dominant distribution channel for hoteliers: $409 billion of hotel gross bookings are expected to come from direct digital channels, compared to just $333 billion from OTAs.”
As much as I’m excited about this prospect, I cannot help being just a bit sceptical – especially as the bulk of the direct bookings growth is likely to be skewed towards large chains. Here’s why!
- Booker convenience and OTA budgets: Unless there is a strong decline or change suggested by some of the other news stories below!
- Economic uncertainties: The projection seems to assume continued economic growth and hotel investment in direct booking technology for the next 6 years. Economic downturns could force hotels to rely more heavily on OTAs to fill rooms
- Tech gap: OTAs (and increasingly many Wholesalers and Tour Operators) continue to innovate with AI, mobile experiences, and personalisation. Individual hotels, especially independents, may struggle to keep pace
- Loyalty Programme Limitations: Direct booking strategies rely heavily on loyalty programmes and independents find it hard to drive volume with such programmes. And younger generations show less interest anyway in traditional hotel loyalty
- Emerging Distribution Channels: Hard to know what new distribution channels could emerge by 2030. There was a partial debate on what happens if one of the AI tools like Chat GPT becomes an intermediary! Or for that matter the speculation around Uber acquiring Expedia…
HotelPlanner reveals its AI-voice hotel agents takes 10,000 calls a day: Travolution reports that “HotelPanner, a travel technology company that powers millions of hotel bookings worldwide, has announced the launch of Hotel Assistant, a world-first end-to-end global team of AI powered booking assistants fielding calls from customers around the world for reservations across more than one million properties.”
Booking.com could cut jobs as part of reorganization plan: Reuters reports that “Booking.com could cut jobs as part of a review of its organizational structure. The company, a unit of Booking Holdings said in an emailed statement that it was in the early stages of the review process and no firm decision had been made. “This is a difficult but necessary proactive step to make sure Booking.com remains agile in a very competitive industry and keeps driving customer-centered innovation at pace,” it said in the statement.”
And in a potentially tangentially related article “Booking.com’s DMA Deadline is Approaching — What Can Hoteliers Expect? ” Triptease talks about Booking.com being the only OTA to be designated as a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s new Digital Markets Act, meaning they had six months to comply with the law’s stringent regulations. This week, those six months are up, and on November 14th Booking.com will release a compliance report detailing the steps that they will be taking to comply with their gatekeeper status. The risk is potentially huge: when Google – one of the first designated gatekeepers – revamped the way they presented hotel booking information in EU search results back in January 2024, Triptease’s data found that direct hotel bookings from Google search results dropped by 30%.
Mews acquires meetings and events technology specialist Quotelo: Phocuswire This could be exciting news potentially for the groups segment given how tech in this segment has been soooooo slow to progress especially in linking the online booker experience with the back end groups department functions!
According to Mews, Quotelo has many strings to its bow, including:
- An intuitive and streamlined booking engine dedicated to MICE and Groups
- Digitalized and automated quotations
- Orchestrating bookings from hours to months
- Room and event space planning visible to all staff members
- Digital function sheets for seamless event execution
