Kayak is beta testing Kayak for Business, a service offering business travelers access to “listings with the added perks of discounted corporate travel rates and a streamlined booking process.” 

TripAdvisor entered into a strategic partnership with Trip . com, which gives the-company-formerly-known-as-CTrip a “long-term exclusive brand, content license and all assets of TripAdvisor’s business in China.” Before the partnership, TripAdvisor operated in China under the DaoDao (2009–2015) and Mau Tu Ying (2015–2019) brands.

Marketplace has been the buzzword of 2019, no doubt about it. The last one to jump on the wagon is Skyscanner. 

Users of the (former) metasearch engine will now be able to book:
- Directly with Skyscanner (the company will handle customer service, payments, etc.)
- Via the existing direct booking service (Skyscanner processes the payment, but the airline owns the customer)
- On the traditional meta model

Skyscanner’s CEO, Bryan Dove, stated that this is a “necessary transition” that will remove “the pain of meta.”

Facebook introduced Pay, which -according to the official statement- “will provide people with a convenient, secure and consistent payment experience across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.” The feature will roll out in the US this week. To use Facebook Pay, go to Settings > Facebook Pay and add a payment method (it already supports most major credit and debit cards and PayPal). The next time you make a payment, you can use Facebook Pay. Once released on WhatsApp and Instagram, you’ll be able to set it up directly within each app. Interestingly, Facebook cared enough to highlight that “Pay is built on existing financial infrastructure and partnerships, and is separate from the Calibra wallet which will run on the Libra network”, probably to distance itself from the latest defections…

Against this trend, it looks like Booking Holdings dodged the proverbial SEO bullet in Q3, registering a 4% YoY gross bookings, a 10% net income, and an 11% room nights increases. CEO Glenn Fogel stated that the group “saw some headwinds in the SEO channel that did create some modest pressure, but,” he added, “it’s a small channel for us.” Booking Holdings’ strategy focused heavily on brand strength and retaining customers, as the #beabooker campaign shows: https://www.youtube.com/embed/agz1YdMD4Qc
“What we know is most important is for us to get customers to come to us directly,” Fogel said, in order to be less “ dependent on other sources of traffic.”

TripAdvisor's revenue coming from the Hotels, Media & Platform declined by a striking 12% on Q3. 

The problem, again, seems to be Google’ SEO advantage: “We believe,” Tripadvisor stated, “our most significant challenge remains Google pushing its own hotel products in search results”. 

Kaufer said that “Q3 was more difficult than we anticipated, and this has dampened our outlook for the remainder of the year.” The company announced “a comprehensive cost structure evaluation.”

Mark Okerstrom and Stephen Kaufer both complained about the fact that their respective organic links are being pushed further down the SERPs, with Google prioritizing its own travel platforms (such as google.com/travel or Maps). During the recent GeekWire Summit, Expedia CEO, Okerstrom, stated that “Google is in this interesting category of being a great partner of ours, but (…) we do look at them in some cases as a competitor.” Expedia’s chairman Barry Diller -don’t forget- was amongst the advocates for increased regulation of Google. On the topic, Okerstrom played the politically-correct card: “it’s not for me to say that there should be legislation or regulation, but I think there’s a role for regulatory oversight of these big platforms and I’ll leave it to the regulators to figure out if there should be something done or not.”

“Lack of price accuracy,” Mirai wrote in a very good article, “is probably the most annoying problem in metasearch”. And one of the reasons is “the several components to get to the final price,” such as tax base, taxes (VAT), local taxes, and resort fees. Google took action by “adding the option to see prices in the way user prefers.
+ Per night, excluding taxes and fees (not available in Europe as it’s mandatory to show final prices);
+ Per night, including taxes and fees;
+ Total price of the stay (all nights), including taxes and fees.”

Where are OTAs going? Will they become SaaS companies?

Oracle acquired the cloud-native guest loyalty platform CrowdTwist, to offer tailor-made loyalty and reward programs… while its servers (Oracle WebLogic Servers) were attacked by a cryptocurrency mining bot malware.