ITHACA, NEW YORK A new Cornell University study confirms the existence of the so-called “billboard effect” of online travel agent websites, with hotels seeing major increases in bookings to their own sites after consumers first find them on an OTA site.
Chris Anderson, an assistant professor at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, replicated and expanded an earlier study that found that a hotel’s listing on Expedia.com increased total reservation volume, in addition to reservations processed through Expedia itself. This larger study looks at 1,720 transactions for IHG brands during the summer months of 2008, 2009 and 2010.
“It’s clear that there is increased reservation volume on the ‘brand.com’ site as a result of having the hotel appear on the online travel agent site,” Anderson says, “and it appears that the commissions paid to online travel agents actually should be considered a marketing expense.”
Anderson also tracked the surfing behavior of would-be hotel guests. He found that almost 75% of the consumers who booked at the brand’s site visited the OTA, with 83% performing a web search prior to the booking, and two-thirds doing both. “Some travelers spend enormous time researching hotels online,” he says. “On average, hotel consumers made 12 visits to an OTA’s website, requested 7.5 pages per visit, and spent almost five minutes on each page before booking.”
The study uses publicly available data from comScore on IHG brands to assess the impact of listing at OTAs upon bookings on the “hotelbrand.com” site. The complete study, “Search, OTAs, and Online Booking: An Expanded Analysis of the Billboard Effect,” can be downloaded for free.