How to use Trivago Book & Go

What is Trivago Book & Go?

Trivago Book & Go, also known as Trivago Express Booking, is an interface that allows a user to book a hotel room with a hotel or OTA without leaving the Trivago website. In Trivago’s own words, Book & Go “facilitates the reservation between [the user] and selected booking sites and accommodation providers.”

As Expedia Group’s main metasearch engine, Trivago doesn’t take hotel bookings – it instead collates hotel booking options from around the web. Trivago usually waves goodbye to users once they have found the hotel they want to book; the user clicks a button labelled ‘View deal’ or ‘Visit site’, and is then transferred to the booking site to make their reservation.

Instead of sending users off to another site, Trivago Book & Go lets users book from within the Trivago site. It is a feature that Trivago offers certain hotel and OTA booking sites, and that these sites can choose to opt into. 

Is Trivago Book & Go legit?

While it’s a little different to how Trivago has worked historically, Trivago Book and Go is a perfectly legitimate feature developed by the site itself. Trivago has seen that hotel metasearch is evolving, and in response it has brought out a number of features, from Book & Go to Direct Connect, to ensure it remains relevant and competitive in the space.

Trivago is simply another tool at a hotel’s or OTA’s disposal – one designed to increase the amount of bookings you earn from Trivago, by streamlining the reservation process as much as possible.

Likewise, Book & Go is entirely optional for the user – a guest can still complete their booking on the OTA or hotel website rather than on Trivago if they so choose.

How to use Trivago Book & Go

Per Trivago, Book & Go “promotes offers for accommodation in cooperation with selected partners who operate online booking sites.” The key term here is ‘selected partners’ – this is an invite-only feature, so only certain hotels and OTAs are able to offer it.

In order to attract that offer, you first need to be listed on Trivago. For hoteliers, this means creating your own direct booking listing, rather than relying on OTAs listing your property for you.

If you are selected by Trivago to take part in the program, you’ll work with the site to ensure your direct booking engine integrates with the Book & Go interface, and you’ll work with Trivago to develop offers that the site can promote, and that will hopefully help you attract more direct bookings.

How does Trivago Book & Go compare to other distribution channels?

The closest thing to Trivago Book & Go are the ‘direct’ booking options offered by other hotel metasearch sites, like TripAdvisor and Google Hotels. Both of these platforms have features – Book on TripAdvisor and Book on Google – that work in much the same way as Trivago Book & Go. Users are able to book their preferred room without leaving the site, simplifying and streamlining the booking process.

Given Trivago Book & Go can help independent hoteliers generate more direct bookings, perhaps the most obvious distribution channel comparison is with your direct booking website.

Ultimately, Trivago is a way to encourage more potential guests to book direct with you. If you take a booking through Trivago Book & Go, it will still be a direct booking, even though the user makes the reservation on the Trivago site. In the end, then, Trivago simply increases the number of potential direct booking guests you have access to.

Trivago collects a fixed percentage fee from its selected Book & Go partners for each booking that is made through the service, but this fee is generally more than worth it to gain access to Trivago’s millions of unique monthly users, and is generally lower than that charged by OTAs.

Connecting Trivago Book and Go with your property management system

While Trivago Book and Go is only available to selected partners, if you are one of those partners, you can enjoy more control over the direct bookings that the service provides if you integrate Trivago with a hotel property management system.

The reality is that while the Trivago metasearch engine can be a powerful source of bookings – the site gets almost 10 million visitors every month – for most independent hotels it will be just one of many channels through which they take bookings.

A hotel management system, and specifically a booking channel management tool within  that system, offers a way to manage bookings that come from all manner of places: metasearch engines, OTAs, or direct website bookings.