METASEARCHERS AND ONLINE TRAVEL AGENCIES (OTA), ARE THEY THE SAME ?

Which are the best hotel booking sites where a successful hotel should appear? Are all them the same? Let’s find out.

According to the study Minerva Travel 2018 conducted by Google, the 70 % of all the world hotel reservations were made online through any of the available booking sites.

Between all these sites it is important to differentiate two big groups; The Metasearchers & OTAs (online travel agencies).

Basically, we could say that a Metasearcher it works by comparing rates and availabilities of each property  through all the OTA’S & booking sites redirecting the user to the selected option for proceeding to the reservation.

Metasearchers have become popular since they allow the users the option of comparing thousands of properties based on many different OTAs ( online travel agencies) and hotel’s websites which reduces considerably the searching time for the best option.

On the other hand the main weakness of the Metasearchers is that after showing the compared results to the user they redirect them, based on the selected option, to the OTA’s or hotel’s website in order to proceed  for the booking. This non-direct way of booking sometimes it gets interrupted by the user due to unexpected changes of the conditions based on the prices or availabilities.

Most of this unexpected changes are due to the slower update between sites or expired links.

Curiosity :Metasearchers are also getting really popular for the booking of flights or insurances with companies such as Skyscanner or Insurify.

During the last years, we have seen how some OTA’s groups have decided to acquire Metasearchers like the case of  Priceline acquiring Kayak or Expedia acquiring Trivago.

The main differences between Metasearchers and OTA’S in terms  of marketing investment from the hoteliers are:

• Metasearchers have commonly a lower cost per booking since they do not charge % per booking like the OTA’S ( normally OTA’S such as Booking or Expedia use to charges 15-30% per booking by depending of the hotel election) they use to have charges per acquisition (CPA) or click (CPC).

• Increase of the hotel’s visibility. From 2014 the traffic through the Metasearchers has tripled. This fact will probably keep growing up due to the appearance of new actors on stage like Google or the increasing marketing investment of sites like Tripadvisor or Trivago.

• The Hotel get full customer data. By using Metasearchers the hotels get the bookings like if they were direct bookings if they  redirect the user to the hotel’s site. Then instead of getting a generic email address from the OTA the hotel gets the full guest information ( name, email address, phone…) available to be used for possible future marketing campaigns.

• Represent a fantastic way of improve the branding of your hotel since it is possible to manage the bookings directly.

The OTA’s (online travel agencies) are probably the most well known booking sites for the users. Sites such as Priceline, Booking, Agoda or Expedia are some of them.

OTA’s are booking sites that directly manage the inventory of rooms  of the hotels. Their main advantage is the high digital presence that they provide to the properties making them visible on the network and increasing their possibilities of booking.

Since this sites manage the bookings directly this implies a % cost per booking and a managing work from the hotel in case of appearing in more than 1 OTA at the same time.

The main advantages of the OTA’s based on our opinion are:

• They do provide to small-medium hotels with great and technological tools in order to manage the bookings and keep a great efficiency level in terms of occupancy.

• They use to offer to  the hoteliers, specially the small ones, with a tourist tendencies from their areas in order to help them improve their services.

• Help to increase the visibility on the network independently of the size of the hotels.

From CATHAI C CONNECTION we do personally recommend METASEARCHERS among the OTA’s because we truly believe that the second ones are the best option in order to protect and improve the branding of the hotels.

Also during the last years it is important to comment about the meteoric growth of GOOGLE travel business which does provide a really interesting service for hotels working as a METASEARCHER with a great presence on the network due to the powerful influence of Google search engine.

References: imorillas.com, cityexpress.com.