Travel marketplaces rising in the Travel & Tourism industry consolidation scenario

According to Amadeus, an average traveller organising a holiday searches nearly 50 times online, makes 38 site visits, reads a dozen reviews, researches for 15 weeks, and does not have a particular destination in mind when he or she starts looking.

Moreover, in its report “Online Travel 2020: Evolve, Expand or Expire”, foresees different scenarios of the online future of the Travel & Tourism industry, as companies are starting to evolve in order to satisfy their customers. One of the possible scenario is called “Travel Marketplace”, and it is described as “the players of the travel industry could come together and build their own Travel Marketplace platform for OTAs, airlines, hotels, and other travel-related companies to sell their products and services”. In addition, as we have already reported, the Travel & Tourism industry is becoming familiar with a strong consolidation phase and an intense period of mergers and acquisitions.

Two of the most relevant operations are outlining the evolution described above.

In particular, Chinese players have been main characters of this phase. First of all Ctrip, China’s leading provider of travel services which can count on more than 300mn users, acquired the social review company Trip.com last year, to support the newly-acquired Skyscanner in enhancing local recommendations. Trip.com had previously raised about 31,6 million euros (39mn dollars) in funding, and Homeaway was among the investors.

As this is happening in the East, the West has not stood still. In fact, as reported by China Travel News, Priceline Group (now Booking Holdings) is planning to integrate two of its brands – Rentalcars and Booking.com – to set up “the world’s largest digital platform for experiences”. The resulting platform will be named BookingGo, and will be a dedicated global ground transport business unit of Booking.com.

At Twissen we observed that offering “a one-stop full-service travel booking platform” is one of the strongest trend both for Eastern and Western companies, providing the customer a seamless booking experience, easy to organise.

Martina Baldo

She graduated in Intercultural Development of Tourism Systems and she has a passion for foreign languages and cultures. Since 2016 she works as administration and tourism project manager at Twissen.