Recently I saw a statement claiming that 75% of travelers use metasearch at some point during the planning process, which made the channel crucial for driving direct bookings.
There are three glaring inaccuracies in this statement:
1. No, 75% of travelers DO NOT use metasearch to plan their hotel stays.
Travel consumers do not know of and do not use the term “metasearch”! “Meta what? Isn’t this the new name of Facebook?” Most of them have not even heard the term.
Metasearch is a made-up term by Wall Street analysts, originally used for online retail from the early 2000s (remember ShopMania, Shopzilla, etc.?) when Amazon still wasn’t the powerhouse it is today. Later, the term was adopted by hospitality digital marketing agencies and hoteliers. Google doesn’t call their Google Hotel Ads (GHA) program “metasearch”, nor does Tripadvisor, etc.
Most travelers use Expedia and Booking to shop around and compare hotel rates. Asked “Do you use hotel rate comparison sites when planning your hotel stay?”, most of them would reply YES! This doesn’t make the OTAs to be metasearch sites since OTAs don’t feature rates from other hotel intermediaries.
In the last “normal” year in travel - 2019 - Google reported that travelers planning a hotel stay had over 45 touchpoints in their Digital Customer Journey before making a hotel booking. These touchpoints include OTA sites, hotel sites, customer reviews, social media sites, etc., sometimes visited multiple times and via various devices:...
Read Full Story: https://www.hospitalitynet.org/opinion/4109545.html
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