We tend to think of hotel brands as, well, brands. Distinct identities. Lifestyle positioning. Design, tone of voice, target audience. But as I’ve repeatedly called them, they’re labels.
Traffic data shows the real power is at the holding company level. And that is where traffic, distribution, and ultimately control start to concentrate. Take the top six hotel groups. Together they capture roughly 84 percent of all organic traffic across 36 major players.
And here is where it gets interesting.
Outside of industry professionals and point hunters, I don’t think many navigate this consciously. They might think they are booking an Aloft hotel, or a Moxy, or a Pullman. But the moment you move through the booking flow, you are no longer interacting with a “brand.” You are inside Marriott, Accor, IHG.
Which means the real competition is not brand vs brand. It is system vs system.
This also explains why scale adds up so much. Marriott alone generates around 76 million organic visits per month. Hilton adds another 59 million. Wyndham contributes 30 million. The top three already control more traffic than the remaining 33 groups combined.
It get’s quite interesting when you start mixing in the OTAs into the mix. We often hear that Airbnb is “the new hotel company.” It is a great narrative. It positions them alongside Marriott, almost as a modern equivalent. I always thought it was smart, but a little deceptive. They were always an OTA.
Anyhow, Airbnb generates around 20 million organic visits. That places it below the top six hotel groups. Expedia, “the second biggest OTA”, would rank roughly fourth below Wyndham. And yet, Airbnb’s market cap sits at around $82 billion, not far off Marriott’s $95 billion.
Markets and reality are not always aligned. I think we know that by now.
Still a fun infographic and excercise done by the 10 Minutes Team. And they’re sharing the dataset with subscribers.
Ten fun facts that stood out from the dataset:
- The top 3 hotel groups control 56.4 percent of all organic traffic
- The top 6 control 83.8 percent
- The median hotel group gets less than 1 million visits
- Marriott is 81 times larger than the median
- Booking.com alone exceeds the combined traffic of the top 6 hotel groups, which also means more than 83.8% of the rest of the hotel groups
- Agoda is roughly equal in size to Marriott in organic traffic, meaning Agoda alone is bigger than #1
- OTAs collectively generate 2.9 times more traffic than hotel groups
So yes, brands still matter. But not in the way we often think. I guess everyone needs to become the number one of their niche and then these comparisons don’t matter anymore. Or do they?
