What TikTok Go costs Google, the OTAs, and hotels

Google loses traffic. OTAs lose money. Hotels lose direct bookings.

TikTok Go launched this week adding in-app booking for hotels and experiences through Booking.com, Expedia Group, Trip.com Group and other partners.

What the launch costs is a different question. Three parties already pay, in different ways and for different amounts.

Google loses traffic

Hotel inspiration has been moving to social platforms for years. The output, for the traveler, was usually a hotel name. The next step was almost always a Google search for that name — not to discover, but to verify rates, check reviews, and decide.

As argued in Hotel information is broken — and so is discovery, TikTok was a substantial driver of that brand-name search traffic — more so than the AI tools Google credited.

TikTok Go removes that step for travelers who book in-app. Inspiration, verification, and transaction happen in one surface. Google does not appear. YouTube, Instagram, word-of-mouth, and AI shortlists still feed brand-name searches into Google, so the step is thinning, not disappearing. But the travelers who do book in-app no longer route through Google — and TikTok is unlikely to be the only social platform to ship this feature.

OTAs lose money

The OTAs look like winners. They keep the transaction. Their inventory is the inventory.

The math is different. Booking.com's own affiliate program pays referrers 25 to 40 percent of its commission when discovery happens off its site. The hotel pays the same 15 percent. Booking.com nets closer to 9 or 10. The TikTok Go split has not been disclosed, but the structure is identical: someone else does the discovery, and the OTA is back-office. Net per booking drops by roughly a third.

A third is the floor, not the ceiling. Hotels that wanted Booking.com's discovery layer to work for them paid for it — the Preferred Partner program adds 2 to 5 percentage points to the base commission, taking effective take rates to 17 to 20 percent. That premium bought visibility inside Booking.com's own search, filtering, and recommendation surfaces. In the TikTok Go flow, those surfaces are TikTok's. The OTA goes from netting close to 20 percent on a discovery-led booking to netting 9 or 10 on an affiliate-routed one — roughly half. Investors will not like that math.

Hotels lose direct bookings

The Google brand-search step was the only place in the post-social funnel where a direct booking sometimes happened. A traveler searching a specific hotel name occasionally landed on brand.com — particularly for chains with strong brand defense, but also for independents who invested in paid search on their own name. The conversion was modest and the channel was contested. But it was the only direct booking pathway that benefitted from social inspiration without requiring the hotel to host its own social audience at scale.

The hotels best positioned to use it were the ones building creator strategies most deliberately: lifestyle and design-led independents, experiential resorts, boutique city hotels aligned with younger travelers. These properties cannot win Google Hotel Ads — the economics favor chain advertisers and OTA bid intensity. And they cannot match chain brand.com scale on Booking.com or Expedia. What lifestyle independents could do was earn discovery on TikTok and let the brand-name search route the booking home.

For travelers who complete the booking inside TikTok Go, that pathway closes. The OTA partners are baked in. A hotel can be the subject of the video, the property the creator featured. It cannot be the seller — only the partner OTAs can.

How much of the detour survives depends on whether travelers still want to verify on the hotel's own website. At higher price points and longer stays, they more often do — and TikTok Go does not include the hotel site. For lower-consideration bookings, the in-app rate and review surface will more often be enough. Either way, fewer travelers exit to Google than did a week ago.

One beneficiary

The flat reading of TikTok Go is that the booking journey got shorter. The accurate reading is that the discovery layer moved — out of Google, out of the OTAs, into TikTok, where travelers already were. Each of the three players who held a piece of the old funnel keeps less than they did a week ago. TikTok keeps what it did not have a week ago: a cut on hotel bookings.

by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today

Read also: TikTok becomes a hotel booking channel

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