Booking.com joins OTA big leagues with more products

Booking.com – renowned for its role in providing hotel booking capabilities – is graduating from this single-focus and becoming a multi-faceted OTA in its own right.

Visitors to Booking.com will now see tabs that offer Flights, car rentals, and Restaurant bookings, albeit not everyone will see it while it’s in its initial trial phase, according to Skift.

The tabs take users to new pages powered by Kayak for flights, RentalCars.com for car hire, and OpenTable for restaurant bookings, while still carrying the Booking.com branding. These OTA brands – Booking.com included – are all part of the Priceline Group.

But it’s not exactly the most surprising move for a hotel OTA that’s proven itself on the global stage, in a time when online travel agencies try to target every stage of the traveller’s journey.

Just last week, a new luxury OTA known as Bon Voyage launched to curate premium holiday packages for travellers, while a number of turf wars have erupted between the hotel and travel agents, and OTAs.

Rival OTA Expedia calls itself the world’s largest travel agency, per Skift, while Expedia’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told Travel Weekly exclusively that its the millennials that will ensure OTAs keep moving on their upward trajectory.

But back to Booking.com.

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The flights search results page, when we viewed it, showed flights from various airlines, where users can navigate a number of search results before being directed to the airline website for booking. From Travel Weekly‘s own quick search, neither Kayak nor Priceline.com seemed to be handling the bookings, just pushing users onwards to the airline’s own check-out.

But as Skift points out, adding flights to Booking.com is a pretty smart move, with most people booking flights long before they even consider where they’ll sleep.

Keeping things in the family, so to speak, with Priceline’s brands of Kayak, RentalCars and OpenTable, means Booking.com can offer these products without detracting from its main focus, which remains hotels.

When users select the restaurants tab at the top of the Booking.com homepage on desktop, they are automatically directed to OpenTable, where they can research restaurants and make dining reservations.

Selecting rental cars on the Booking.com homepage directs users to its RentalCars.com sister site.

Per Skift, Booking.com has been looking at adding flight options for years, and by adding cars and restaurant reservations as well will be an added step in Booking.com’s efforts to become more of a full-service travel booking site, enabling it to properly compete with Expedia.

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

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