Are OTAs losing share in the mountains?

It’s hard to avoid the topic of OTAs in today’s hotel marketing landscape. But it’s also hard to find data on OTA reliance when it comes to mountain destinations where they sometimes play a smaller, but nonetheless important, role. So is their share growing, shrinking, or holding steady? We have the data, so we found an answer.

The Goods
To find that answer we looked at five years of booking history for more than 25 hotels at mountain destinations across the United States. We then found the average percentage of total bookings that OTAs represented for each of the last five years (including 2015 YTD) and plotted those percentages on the chart below.

After sitting around 10% in 2011, the numbers have steadily grown since then. So far in 2015, OTAs have represented just under 16% of all bookings for the properties we looked at.

What This Means
While the numbers have grown, it’s still well within the 20% figure many lodging experts recommend hotels try to keep OTA volume.

At the current rate of growth, however, the average across the hotels in our sample could reach that point within the next 2-3 years. Either way, the next few seasons will be very important to watch.

Next Week: More
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