Skift Take
Smaller independent hotels in Europe, lacking the marketing budgets and tech capabilities of branded counterparts in the U.S., are more inclined to rely on online travel agencies for distribution rather than their own sites.
In Part I of our series on Google Travel, we analyzed the hotel distribution landscape in the U.S. by web-scraping over 5,000 hotels and their respective distribution offerings across Google’s sponsored and organic auctions.
In Part II of our series, we repeat our efforts across the European hotel market. We looked at 40 European cities and again web-scraped over 5,000 hotels to compare the distribution landscape in Europe versus the U.S.
One of the key conclusions from our analysis: Direct sites compete head-on with online travel agencies (OTAs) more often in the U.S. than in Europe.
Though both markets are fairly mature with similar levels of online penetration, Europe’s hote