Tripadvisor sells fewer clicks to hotels every quarter, and charges more for each one.
Tripadvisor's hotel revenue fell 23% last quarter as free search traffic dried up, but the reviews AI assistants quote about your hotel still live there
by Markus Busch
Driving the news. Tripadvisor's hotel business shrank again in the second quarter. Revenue from hotels, almost all of it from the metasearch clicks Tripadvisor sells to hotels and OTAs, fell 23% to $117.9 million, the company reported on August 6. Its quarterly filing gives the reason in plain terms. Free traffic, particularly from search engines, declined. Fewer travelers arrived, fewer clicked through to a booking site, and the drop in clicks more than offset a rise in what each click costs. Tripadvisor expects the hotel side to fall another 20% to 23% in the third quarter.
The company is paying for the same problem. The filing says its marketing costs rose as a share of revenue because it had to buy the visitors that search used to send for free.
What a click costs now. For anyone bidding on Tripadvisor's hotel results, that is the arithmetic: fewer travelers to bid for, and a higher price for each one who clicks.
Hotels had been moving for years. In 2013, 71% of European hotels using a metasearch site used Tripadvisor, according to HOTREC's distribution studies. By 2021 it was 57%, and by 2023 44%, while Google Hotel Ads rose to 80%. In the 2026 edition, 83% of hotels connected to a metasearch site use Google. The slide began years before anyone typed a hotel question into a chatbot.
What stays. The reviews. An analysis we reported earlier this year found that AI assistants lean heavily on Tripadvisor when they recommend hotels. Grok cited it in almost every answer. Tripadvisor is losing travelers who come to the site. Nothing in the filing touches its place as one of the sources the machines read.
The company has already moved its money elsewhere. Its growth now comes from tours: bookings through Viator rose 10% in the quarter.
The catch. Tripadvisor doesn't split its hotel revenue between hotels and OTAs, so the filing can't tell you how much of the drop is hotels buying fewer clicks. The higher price per click is an average across all advertisers, not your rate. The HOTREC figures are European. And the filing names search engines, not AI. Whether Google's AI answers explain part of the drop, Tripadvisor hasn't said.
What it means for hotels. Tripadvisor is now two different things for a hotel, and they need two different decisions.
The clicks are ad spend. If you buy Tripadvisor metasearch through your booking engine or CRS, pull the last four quarters of clicks, cost per click and bookings, and work out what one booking from Tripadvisor now costs you. Compare it with what the same booking costs through Google.
The reviews are reputation work. Keep answering them, and keep the property details on your listing accurate. That page feeds the assistants whatever happens to the site's traffic.
Tripadvisor is selling fewer clicks at a higher price. The reviews it holds are still being read.
Read also: The audience for your guest reviews is no longer a guest · The search that used to send you a guest now keeps her
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