Expedia and Booking is not a duopoly
The global OTA Chart
Expedia and Booking is not a duopoly. I said this some weeks ago when I got a sneak peek at the OTA research data.
Trip.com is significantly larger than Expedia, and strangely almost never mentioned in the same conversations.
Using market cap isn't so practical, organic traffic is more accurate (they are discovery platforms after all). For example Airbnb. Their market cap is $84B, yet its actual discovery reach is just 20 million. Compare that to Trip.com (group) whose market cap is $50B and they their reach is 172 million. From a hotel demand perspective, that distinction matters a lot.
Japan has massive domestic players. India does too. Latin America, Southeast Asia, Central Europe all have OTAs that are enormous in their own regions but far less relevant elsewhere. It is interesting to look at the numbers.
The 10 Minutes News team are giving away the dataset to anyone who is subscribed. Check it out here. While you're clicking, check out my newsletter here: https://martinsoler.substack.com/
When I ran a hotel, we hit a moment where we needed to grow distribution. Our channel manager has this cool thing (now called a marketplace) where there was many distributors and we could simply click to add.
Dozens of potential distributors. Some I had heard of. Most I hadn’t. It felt like someone had emptied a bucket of logos onto our screen. There was no guidance. No indication of size, strength, geography, or fit. I called in whoever I could from the team asking for opinions (so random - but I needed some guidance) they knew this one and thought that one was strong in XX market.
So we started adding them, but it really felt random.
I still believe more distribution is better than less, but there are better ways to do it. We didn’t know where to focus.
That’s why I think the new global distribution chart and Google Sheet dataset just published by the 10 Minutes News team is such a useful tool. It shows where the big players are actually big. Japan has its own ecosystem. So does India. The US might be Expedia/Booking territory, but beyond that, the world looks very different. These aren’t side players, they’re massive - many of them a lot larger than the big ones in the media.
But just adding distribution isn’t really a smart way. Following the idea on how to find a hotel USP (survey only the happiest guests), we applied that to our distribution. We saw that our reviews from UK guests were consistently strong. They liked our property, they understood our offer, and they tended to book again.
Conversely, we noticed that guests from Japan weren’t rating us as well. Different expectations, maybe we weren’t equipped to meet them yet (we didn’t have anyone who spoke the language which is a bad start). So pushing into the Japanese market before fixing those issues would’ve just made things worse.
So I agreed with the 10 Minutes team to release the dataset not just the infographic. And I think that’s quite a great help for everyone. The simple tip is start with the biggest platforms for the markets you already have good reviews in. Use only the best reviews as a guide.
The chart isn’t perfect, China is notably absent, and a few data points feel debatable. If you see something missing or off, leave a comment. The team is updating it, and your feedback makes it better.
