trivago’s Johannes Thomas on the Status of Direct Bookings
Why you won't see a 'book on trivago' experience
To support the important research being done by Skift, a leading source of travel industry intelligence, trivago powered a survey for hoteliers to gather information and raise awareness about the status of direct bookings for independent hotels. The results have given the industry a clearer picture of the future of hotel distribution, and are summarised in Skift's report "2017 Outlook on Hotel Direct Bookings" alongside interviews with eminent industry professionals. Among those interviewed was trivago Managing Director Johannes Thomas.
Find highlights from Thomas's exclusive interview below, condensed for length and precision.
Skift: Can you touch a bit on the trivago Hotel Manager platform, how you partner with hotels and can help increase their direct bookings?
Johannes Thomas: The platform was built specifically for the individual hotel. It enables them to take control of their hotel profile on trivago. There's a basic version that's free to use to improve your hotel's performance on trivago, which really comes down to managing the hotel's story, its visual and written content, and making sure you actually show your strengths and illustrate what your hotel is about.
Then there's the PRO version, a yearly subscription product, which targets a broad spectrum of hotels of all sizes. Hotels with PRO benefit from extra promotion in our search results, and analytics about the traveler, about the competition, and about room rates. It has a rate shopper built in so hotels can compare their rates against competitors'. We're helping them to position themselves better on trivago so they get greater visibility.
For direct bookings, we provide the hotelier with an expert feature, a product where they can connect their website, connect their rate to their profile. One big problem in the industry is that marketing is too complicated. We're trying to build a tailored tool for the hotels so marketing doesn't require years of studying. Marketing on trivago is really a matter of checking the campaign performance once a week. And we're guiding hoteliers step-by-step on how to do that, how to improve their booking engine, how to improve their profile and boost their conversion so that they can be more competitive.
Maybe you can talk a bit about your thoughts on the facilitated booking approach and whether trivago would go down that road of pushing this more aggressively? Also, what is that main difference between the TripAdvisor Instant Booking platform and the trivago Direct Connect functionality?
I can talk about how we think about it. Because we have a clear view on that: We want to be conceived of as a metasearch. The moment a customer thinks he has booked with trivago, or on trivago, and potentially gives us a call wanting to change or cancel his booking is the moment where we say we've done something wrong.
We spend hundreds of millions on TV ads to educate the market on the value proposition of metasearch and what we're doing: providing transparency and more inventory in full view and a great search experience. And we don't want to weaken our position as a search by providing a "book on trivago" experience. I think that's the big difference.
You won't see Instant Booking as an integrated part of our search. What you will see is something that's basically the same as our usual search experience: you click out, and you land on Express Booking, which is advertiser branded. We're going more and more in that direction. Today it's totally advertiser branded and we want to give the hotel a white label to brand as their own. And that's exclusively for their empowerment and to level the playing field, so they can offer a competitive booking experience.
Andrea Ricciarelli
Global B2B Content Marketing & Global PR Lead
trivago
