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TripAdvisor has announced a big coup for its “Instant Booking” service – a partnership with Marriott International and all 19 hotel brands that that includes.
TripAdvisor had, for a long time, been looking for a way to convert users who were looking at hotels on TripAdvisor into users who were booking hotels on TripAdvisor – so, last year, they launched “Instant Booking”. The idea behind Instant Booking is for TripAdvisor to move away from the well-worn model of transferring leads over to hotels or travel sites and to, instead, get hotel shoppers, to book the hotels without ever leaving the TripAdvisor website or app. 
The roll out of Instant booking wasn’t the instant big success that TripAdvisor would have wanted with hotels finding the idea confusing and with the big online travel agents (OTAs) like Orbitz and Expedia shying away. But the product has been improving and, slowly, brands like Accor, Choice Hotels, Best Western and Getaroom have all signed on to the Instant Booking service.
Now, with the major addition of the 19 Marriott Brands, Instant Booking is starting to look a lot more like what TripAdvisor intended and it’s starting to ask questions of the OTAs that are still staying away.
The partnership with Marriott would appear to be a win for both sides with TripAdvisor getting over 4,200 new hotels added to its service and Marriott getting a new distribution channel that’s significantly cheaper than the OTAs it also uses. With TripAdvisor typically charging somewhere in the 10% – 15% range the OTAs are looking more and more expensive with their 20%+ commissions.
One of the major differentiators of the Instant Booking service, from a user perspective, is that the booking is powered by the hotel or chain that the user is booking and not by TripAdvisor or an OTA. So, in this case, it would be Marriott or the hotel itself that the user would contact directly with any customer support inquiries. Technically this should streamline the booking process a lot more and make issues quicker and easier to resolve butler’s wait and see how this all pans out when Marriott properties go live on Instant Booking later this summer.
The full Marriott Press release can be found here.
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