Social Commerce in Travel: Will OTAs dominate Social like they did Search?

Key Summary

• OTAs are repeating their search dominance playbook in social commerce
  With TikTok and Booking.com's partnership launching in-app hotel booking, OTAs are positioning themselves as intermediaries in social platforms, potentially capturing commission on what are currently direct bookings for travel brands.

• Social commerce faces structural barriers for most travel brands
  Despite 61% of travelers finding trip ideas on social platforms, less than 1% of travel bookings are completed through social channels due to travel being a high-consideration purchase requiring weeks of planning, unlike impulse purchases that drive other social commerce categories.

• Strengthening direct channels trumps rushing into social commerce
  Rather than building social booking flows, travel companies should focus on improving their own mobile booking experience, measurement infrastructure, and loyalty programs while using social platforms for discovery that drives traffic to their owned channels.

Action Plan

• Audit your direct channel strength
  Measure the value and percentage of bookings that come from social media through to your own platforms and see whether that's growing; if it's shrinking, critically analyse the customer journey before OTAs capture more social traffic.

• Build measurement infrastructure
  Implement best-practice tracking for social platforms (Meta/TikTok/Pinterest APIs) so you can make data-driven decisions about social commerce investments.

• Get on TikTok while terms are favorable
  Consider TikTok advertising now while users still click through to your booking flow. Waiting until transactions move in-platform means accepting worse terms and losing direct customer relationships.
  
  

The OTA-Channel Pattern

The last time a new distribution channel emerged in travel, the intermediaries won. By the time hotels understood what had happened in search, OTAs owned 73% of first-page Google results and were charging 15–25% commission on bookings that used to cost nothing to acquire. Kalibri Labs analysis of 18,000 US hotels found commissions had risen 45% as a share of guest-paid revenue since 2015. The four largest OTAs now spend a combined $17.8 billion annually on marketing. The machine is self-reinforcing and extraordinarily expensive to compete with once established.

Social commerce is following the same pattern, and it is earlier in the cycle – which means the decisions made in the next few years will determine which side of the commission relationship you end up on.

In August 2025, TikTok and Booking.com launched in-app hotel booking across the US, Indonesia, and Japan. A user watching travel content taps a location pin, views hotel options, and books through Booking.com's infrastructure without leaving TikTok. Hotels get a new demand channel but they also pay standard OTA commission, receive limited guest data, and have diminished brand control. This is not an innovation per se, rather it's simply another extension of Booking.com's OTA affiliate commission model – applied to social media.

"OTAs will always look to get a first-mover advantage when any new channel emerges – it's a core part of their business model and it's tough to constantly compete with that. What I see at Mindera – where we work at the engineering layer of some of Europe's largest travel direct channels, including Trainline's booking platform, which sells 200 million tickets a year – is that the companies with the strongest direct infrastructure are consistently the ones who have the most options when distribution dynamics shift regardless of OTA advantages."

Marius Florea, Travel Vertical Lead, Mindera

The question is not whether this dynamic is real. It is. The question is what the right response looks like for your specific business.

Looking At Travel's Compatibility With Social Commerce

Before acting with urgency to compete, it is worth understanding why social commerce in travel has not exploded in popularity yet.

Social media has already displaced search as the dominant starting point for travel inspiration. Expedia Group's 2025 Traveller Value Index found 61% of travellers now find trip ideas on social platforms, up from 35% in 2022. But discovery and conversion are different problems. Paid social converts at 2.1% in travel – the lowest of any digital channel, compared against 9.5% for referral traffic and 8.5% for organic search. Looking at TikTok, 60% of users say the platform made them interested in a destination – only 35% actually travelled. Looking broader, less than 1% of travel bookings are completed through social platforms today.

All this data does not point to a UX problem that a smoother checkout experience will fix. Travel is a high-consideration purchase – planned weeks or months in advance, involving real money, often involving multiple people. The impulse mechanics that make social commerce work for a £40 fashion purchase do not transfer cleanly to a £2,000 holiday. The barriers are structural, and they will take time to fall, if ever.

One further caveat on the discovery numbers: they skew young. Much of the platform-level data reflect users aged 18–24. Older travellers – who still account for the majority of total travel spend in most categories – continue to start their journeys via search engines and trusted personal recommendation. A luxury cruise operator and a Gen Z hostel brand are not learning the same things when reading the same data. Knowing which audience you actually serve is the most important filter to apply before acting on any of the statistics in circulation.

Which Profile Fits Your Company?

The answer to the social commerce question depends almost entirely on what you sell, who your customer is, and how strong your direct channel already is. There is no universal playbook – but there are four recognisable profiles. Your company may well sit across multiple profiles so consider how you can combine the lessons from each to come away with a distinct action plan for your organisation.

Experience and tour operators have the strongest case for active social commerce investment right now. The product is visual, pre-packaged, and often impulse-friendly at a price point where in-app purchase is realistic. Klook's TikTok creator programme facilitated nearly 500,000 transactions in the Philippines alone in its first eight months – and crucially, the transaction completed on Klook's own platform, not inside TikTok. TourRadar signed 3,500 creator ambassadors within three months of launching its social content booking feature in June 2025. The lesson from both: social commerce works for this product type, and the companies succeeding are the ones who kept ownership of the booking relationship.

Challenger brands without an established direct channel face different economics than incumbents. A brand that has not yet built a dominant direct booking infrastructure has less to protect from intermediation and potentially more to gain from early social commerce capability. For challengers, the cost of waiting to see what happens on social media may outweigh the risk of committing to securing a fist-mover advantage – particularly if the alternative is competing head-on with incumbents' loyalty advantages on their own turf.

Brands whose growth depends on Gen Z face a specific urgency. Gen Z travellers spend an average of $3,432 on leisure travel annually and are growing their travel budgets faster than any other generation. Fifty percent begin travel searches on social platforms before going anywhere else, and 59% are not enrolled in any travel loyalty programme – making them structurally more susceptible to social-driven discovery than older cohorts with existing brand commitments. For a business whose future growth depends on this cohort, absence from social channels carries a direct cost.

Established brands with functioning direct channels – airlines with strong app adoption, hotel groups with active loyalty programmes, OTAs with meaningful direct booking share – are the largest category and the one where the clearest strategic choice exists. For these companies, Ryanair's approach is instructive. Ryanair has approximately 2.7 million TikTok followers and hashtag content exceeding 2.6 billion cumulative views. It has no social commerce capability whatsoever, and over 99% of its tickets sell through its own website and app. Its former Head of Social described the strategy plainly: social media is where you get found; your own channel is where you get paid.

For established brands, strengthening what you have is worth more than building social booking flows for a channel that has not yet demonstrated Western-market conversion at scale. The diagnostic question is specific: what percentage of your bookings come through direct channels today, and is that share growing or shrinking?

"Loyalty infrastructure is one of the most undervalued direct channel assets in travel. When we built the voucher integration between Avios and LeShuttle, the goal wasn't just a new product feature – it was extending Avios's direct relationship with its members into a new category without an intermediary in the transaction. That's the same logic that applies to social commerce: the question isn't which platform to use, it's who owns the customer at the point of sale."

Thais Oliveira, Travel Consulting, Mindera

Where to Focus Now

The most valuable investments are the ones that strengthen your direct channel regardless of how social commerce develops – and that position you to measure any social contribution accurately.

Build the measurement infrastructure

Many travel organisations are making social media investment decisions without reliable attribution data – only 23% of businesses use social data to measure ROI. Not because the data doesn't exist – because the infrastructure to capture it hasn't been built. Server-side tracking (Meta Conversions API, TikTok Events API, Pinterest Conversions API) is still not standard despite its effectiveness.

This matters because every subsequent decision – whether to invest in social commerce, which platforms to prioritise, whether a channel is working – rests on this foundation. Without it, you're working with incomplete information.

"Before a client can decide whether social commerce is worth building, they need confidence in what their data is actually telling them. At Trainline, getting the data engineering foundations right was the prerequisite for every commercial decision that followed – and we see the same pattern across most of our travel clients."

Thais Oliveira, Travel Consulting, Mindera

Make your direct booking channel harder to displace

Booking.com and TikTok are actively building a transaction layer that sits between travel brands and their customers. For brands that haven't invested in their own mobile booking experience, that intermediated alternative will become the path of least resistance – not because customers prefer it, but because it's faster and easier.

The case for fixing your own checkout first is stronger than the case for building social commerce capability. The audit should start with mobile. For example, 31% of all mobile web sessions happen on in-app browsers and all four major social platforms – Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X – default to opening external links in their proprietary in-app browsers. The in-app browser environment adds a layer of friction rarely discussed – broken autofill, inconsistent payment integrations and blocked tracking are all challenges you could be silently facing and contributing to higher than average checkout abandonment rates.

Pinterest Travel Catalogues are worth specific attention here. Unlike most social commerce configurations, they drive traffic to your own booking flow rather than completing the transaction inside the platform. TUI's beta results – a 6x improvement in outbound click-through rate and 80% reduction in cost per click – suggest the mechanic works at scale.

Loyalty infrastructure belongs in this conversation too. Outside the handful of major hotel chains that have built loyalty into active direct-booking engines – such as Marriott Bonvoy which drives 73% of room nights and Hilton Honors which drives over 60% of bookings – most travel loyalty programmes have not evolved beyond passive retention and points collecting. The brands making them work as a direct channel differentiator are still the exception, and clearly successful.

Get on TikTok

TikTok Travel Ads launched in September 2025. The early numbers are impressive: Etihad saw a 17% lift in bookings; Meliá reported ROAS improvements of 156–291% across campaigns. Right now, users click through to the brand's own booking flow – the transaction stays with you.

That's the current state. TikTok has strong commercial incentive to bring transactions inside its own ecosystem, and the Booking.com partnership signals the direction. Brands that have built measurement infrastructure and established TikTok advertising presence before that consolidation will have meaningfully more options than those who come to it afterwards.

The argument isn't that social commerce is the future of travel distribution. It's that TikTok is currently an effective performance channel, and the terms on which you can use it are better now than they're likely to be in two years.

The Timing Question

Social commerce in travel is real enough to take seriously and early enough that no one in Western markets has proved it works at scale. The companies building the transaction layer right now are primarily OTAs and platforms, not inventory owners.

The companies that got the OTA era right were not the ones who moved fastest onto search to compete – they were the ones who built direct channel strength early enough that when OTAs arrived, they had something resilient and a business that continued to grow, not begin to shrink.

"Most companies start with technology. At Mindera, we start with the outcome. At key decision points, we help travel businesses define what they need to protect or build, and then engineer the right solution. That shift in the approach consistently delivers better results."

Mafalda Barros, Business Consulting Lead, Mindera

Action Plan

• Audit your direct channel strength
  Measure the value and percentage of bookings that come from social media through to your own platforms and see whether that's growing; if it's shrinking, critically analyse the customer journey before OTAs capture more social traffic.

• Build measurement infrastructure
  Implement best-practice tracking for social platforms (Meta/TikTok/Pinterest APIs) so you can make data-driven decisions about social commerce investments.

• Get on TikTok while terms are favorable
  Consider TikTok advertising now while users still click through to your booking flow. Waiting until transactions move in-platform means accepting worse terms and losing direct customer relationships.

This article was produced by Mindera's Travel, Transportation & Logistics vertical practice. Research and fact-checking completed March 2026. All data points verified against primary sources where available.