SKEMA Digital Marketing in Tourism and Events: How Meta Search Benefits Tourism Industry?

Meta Search Engine provides search results basing on the sources from other search engines and databases. Then it organizes and presents the results independently according to the users’ requirements. As shown on Picture 1, we can simply consider the Meta Search Engine as the search engine of search engines.

Picture 1.

In fact, Meta Search is not a “newly born” technology but it started to boom in the tourism industry. Thanks to technology innovation and competitions, in 2013, the meta search websites began to integrate what they have not before in order to offering customers everything they want (Picture 2.) (Lopez, 2013).

Picture 2.

It is believed that, in 2014, Meta search will keep on developing and move to the mainstream of online distribution in hospitality industry (Tourism-review.com, 2013) There are three meta search giants, Google, Tripadvisor and Trivago which are specialized in information, reviews and best price respectively which are the three key motivations of travelers. Metasearch sums up the searching results from different search engines, OTAs, databases, even the PMS (Property Management System) and CRS (Computer Reservation System) of the property, providing instant and different prices to the guests. In this way, it creates better user experiences and saves the time for the customers because customers don’t need to click on OTA and hotels’ websites one by one for more favorable prices.

As a result, how should hotels, meta search websites and OTAs react to this trend?

Some international hotel groups cooperate with the Meta Search engines directly and show their prices directly on the list, for example, Marriott Hotel Group, shown on Picture 3. This provides better visibility for the hotels and attracts more customers to their official websites.

Picture 3.

For the small and medium size independent hotels, it is difficult to cooperate with the Meta Search engines directly. Therefore, choosing OTAs that cooperate with more Meta Search engines which are welcomed by more customers is important to seek better visibility.

However, Meta Search is not as powerful as people expected, because its performance is limited by the content, quality and quantity of the cooperating OTAs or databases. Take an example of searching Hilton Time Square on both TripAdvisor and Google Hotel Finder with the same date. TripAdvisor (Picture 4) presents results from 6 OTAs, from 224USD to 254 USD while Google Hotel Finder (Picture 5) shows only one result from Booking.com with 224 USD. Therefore, choosing the suitable business partners to increase visibility and revenue is important for OTAs, hotels as well as Meta Search Engines.

Picture 4.