Skift Take
Google is constantly tweaking its hotels platform and we see its latest iteration contributing directly to the democratization of the online travel industry.
Skift Research has conducted an extensive data-scraping of the Google Hotels platform to understand Google’s role in the hotel distribution landscape.
We wanted to understand the following: how hotels are listed on Google, which OTAs are bidding for bookings, and whether Google is aiding direct bookings to compete more head-on with online intermediaries.
We scraped data from over 5,000 hotel listings across the U.S. (roughly 100 hotels per U.S. state). For each hotel listing, we scraped the booking options and their corresponding prices across both the sponsored (paid) box and the organic (free) box.
In total, we analyzed more than 130,000 data points: 40,000 from the sponsored options and more than 90,000 from the organic options.
Why Did We Do It?As we wrote last y