A 61% difference between OTA bookers and the rest.

It’s no surprise that OTAs are a hot topic. Even so, resort-specific insights when it comes to OTA use are few and far between. Starting today, we’re doing something about that by looking at how critical guest behaviors differ when reservations come through an OTA. We’ll begin with lead times. Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at bookings from thirteen destinations during the last year. This sample included over 200,000 reservations. We teased out bookings made via OTAs and compared the average lead times of each group for each destination.

For the destinations in this sample, OTA bookings had an average lead time of 33 days (orange horizontal line above) while non-OTA bookings saw a lead time of 53 days (gray horizontal line above).

What This Means
What should be telling is that despite the variety of ranges, only one destination saw longer lead times from OTAs (a difference of 2 days). The next closest gap was 7 days in favor of non-OTAs.

But even looking at all these points together, the average difference between the groups was 20 days. Let’s put this another way. On average, reservations in this sample that came from non-OTAs we’re booked 61% further in advance.

More OTA, More Everything
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