Even after spending billions on marketing, very few Online travel agents make the mark when it comes to sites used to choose a hotel.
As per a research by hotel digital marketing and software specialist Fuel, sites such as Booking.com, Expedia and Hotels.com were used by about a fifth of consumers to book a hotel, almost double that used none of these famous brands.
Booking.com was top of the sites used by consumers when they last chose a hotel for a leisure vacation (24%), followed by Expedia (22%) and Hotels.com by 20%.
Airbnb was also in the list which was used by just over 10% of consumers, according to the research, and VRBO (formerly HomeAway), used by just under 10%.
As per the findings 27% of travellers say they use sites for price comparison and 32% use them to book just the hotel element of their vacation. And about a 5% did not use these third party sites.
The Fuel 2019 Leisure Travel Trends study also reveals search engines such as Google as the main place to begin planning a holiday for 44%, followed by online travel agencies for 18% and a hotel’s own website for 10% and thus cited these as most influential when it comes to planning a vacation.
According to the Respondents, the device usage to plan and book their vacations was the desktop at 41%, followed by tablets at 40% and smartphone at 29%.
The study also reveals that online bookings were more popular at 73% and the remainder mostly made by phone.
Author: Manoj .S
Manoj works as Team Lead in Teknokraaft and looks into the Flights vertical primarily.