Trip Advisor’s Instant Booking Rollout Proving to be Costly

TripAdvisor’s global rollout of its Instant Booking initiative may be costlier than many financial analysts had initially anticipated.

While TripAdvisor executives in May said Instant Booking’s financial impact so far this year was in line with company expectations, some analysts said that the effort by the world’s largest travel-review site to add overseas hotel inventory to the feature will cost the company more than it was expecting.

“Much work still lies ahead in terms of closing the monetisation gap versus [metasearch], as well as driving greater consumer adoption for Instant Booking,” investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Naved Khan wrote in a 5 May note to clients.

After boosting revenue 20% in 2015, TripAdvisor’s first-quarter revenue fell 3% from a year earlier, to US$352 million, while net income dropped 57%, to $27 million.

With hotels and OTAs battling it out for distribution share of room bookings, TripAdvisor has been reaching agreements with both sectors to widen the inventory on Instant Booking, which enables visitors to the travel-review site to book rooms without leaving the website.

After launching Instant Booking in June 2014 with inventory from Choice Hotels International, TripAdvisor added Marriott International as a distribution partner in Spring 2015, then reached an agreement with Priceline Group’s Booking.com last fall.

TripAdvisor takes about 8% commission on Instant Booking’s room revenue, according to Piper Jaffray’s estimates.

TripAdvisor offers Instant Booking for about 500,000 hotels on its site, up from about 400,000 at the beginning of the year. In Las Vegas, the largest U.S. hotel market, Instant Booking was available for all of the first 10 properties listed on a TripAdvisor search for hotels early last week. In Los Angeles, eight of the first 10 offered Instant Booking, while in New York, seven of the first 10 offered the feature.