Metasearch is becoming a more common feature of the Australian online travel landscape with the last two years seeing the arrival of a number of international players that use the technology.

The use of the search facility, which draws results from a number of online sources, has seen strong growth in places such as the US and Europe, with Australia lagging a little way behind. 

Australia-based Hotelscombined.com has been in operation since 2005, with its creation of an "all-encompassing" site offering rates from a range of travel sites in a centralised location.

But the last two years have seen the arrival of UK flight search engine Skyscanner, US rival Kayak and Germany’s hotel-focused Trivago, with all confident the Australian market is ready for the influx.

Skyscanner’s marketing manager ANZ Dave Boyte underlined impressive growth of 93% in its number of unique monthly visitors in the last year.

“In the travel agency category in Australia Skyscanner is ranked 5^th and is 1st for flight metasearch,” he said.

“These results are positive signs that Australians are embracing what Skyscanner is about.”

Meanwhile, Trivago also reported a “strong response” from Australians since its local launch last year.

“We can see that although it is a growing concept, there has been a quick understanding of how meta works and that users are coming back to use the site regularly, whether that be for short business trips or looking for hotels on longer holidays,” Australia and New Zealand head Benjamin Moller-Butcher said.

“Australians have a very well developed online understanding – areas such as search, meta and price comparison are active across many verticals and users have experience in using such websites (not only in the travel industry) to find the products and services they want.”

Kayak too has reported a strong local start since its September 2013 launch, attributing the growth to brand recognition as a result of its strong foothold in the US market which also enables it to leverage its scale, vice president Asia Pacific Debby Soo explained

“Because we’re so big in certain markets, we’re really able to leverage that when we come into a new market,” she said.

Popular independent review site TripAdvisor also last year introduced a metasearch facility which chief executive Stephen Kaufer described as a “clearly better user experience” which was delivering benefits for its users and customers worldwide, with Australia in line with the global trend.

And despite the burst of new entrants, HotelsCombined.com is unfazed, insisting the Australian marketplace is large enough to accommodate several metasearch sites and highlighting the benefits for both consumers and suppliers.

“HotelsCombined is now the leading accommodation metasearch site in Australia, which suggests that Australians continue to recognise and trust the benefits of metasearch,” chief operating officer Hichame Assi told Travel Today.

“We’ve seen huge growth in our traffic  numbers and are currently averaging over 300 million users a year  – considering we were averaging 80 million users less than three years ago, this is quite an impressive increase.

“With mobile and tablet use steadily increasing across the globe, these numbers are only set to further spike upwards as we continue to upgrade and add new travel apps to the market.”

Assi identified Australia as an “e-ready growth market” that is relatively easy to penetrate due to its similarities with the UK and US in terms of cultural and behavioural trends.

“It is a good place for these international companies to build out their Asia Pacific presence,” he said.

"Australians love to travel and are more accustomed to booking online. With an increasing number of travel and accommodation sites to choose from, meta-search has become more compelling.”

Research analyst Chetan Kapoor of PhocusWright agreed with this theory, explaining that the primary reason behind the sudden rise of metasearch in the local market is that Australia is ranked among the countries with the highest Internet penetration in the world. Combined with the fact that its consumer online maturity is similar to that of Europe and North America, the local market becomes very attractive for online companies as a whole, including metasearch.

“Above all, both Trivago and Skyscanner are armed with fresh funding and are expanding beyond Europe in search of growth,” Kapoor told Travel Today.

He described Australia as an “open field” which has previously been largely untouched by metasearch other than locally based HotelsCombined.com.

The value of metsasearch sites as a marketing partner for travel businesses is also a key driver for growth, creating “qualified leads” for partners.

However, Kapoor identified Google as a major challenge for metasearch, with many travel companies investing in Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

“Convincing partners to engage with them by shifting advertising and marketing dollars to metasearch, often takes time and meta players need to prove their worth by generating leads,” he said.

“Content and partner localisation is also very important. While getting airlines onboard could be relatively easy, dealing with suppliers in the fragmented hotel segment, is cumbersome.”