The Travel Industry Needs a New Way to Read OTA Results

Last month, I posed a question: Have OTAs stopped being a reliable proxy for travel demand?

I pointed to credit-card data showing near-zero correlation between consumer travel spending and OTA gross bookings. The R² values were striking: 0.03 for Booking, 0.11 for Expedia, and 0.02 for Airbnb. Those low values mean that consumer travel spending explained almost none of the movement in OTA results over the past three years.

So I set up a test for the latest earnings cycle: We know consumer travel spending was soft and if OTAs reported strong gross bookings anyway, it would confirm the decorrelation thesis — essentially that OTA growth is coming from share gains and monetization mechanics, not demand tailwinds.

Well, the earnings are in, and the thesis is confirmed.

The Results

The top OTAs reported strong gross bookings growth: Booking Holdings and Airbnb both posted 16% increases — Airbnb’s strongest quarter in more than two years