6 Hotel Booking Platform Success Stories [2023]
The explosively popular Airbnb and countless similar services have proven that the market for home and apartment rentals is growing rapidly. As an entrepreneur who loves travel, you see an opportunity to extend this model to hotels. That’s why you start a hotel booking platform where travelers can search for and book accommodations worldwide.
The market size of the online hotel booking platform industry worldwide amounted to nearly $518B in 2020. Starting a hotel booking platform can be so interesting as an idea that can proliferate. It doesn’t require any license, no inventory — only mobile phones, an internet connection, and some motivation to succeed.
Here are some real life success stories of starting a hotel booking platform:
1. Tripadvisor ($1.37B/year)
Get ready for the new TripAdvisor! Face to face with Stephen Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor, this interview during ITB Berlin Convention reveals insights into the world's largest travel platform. You'll get to know the importance of trust and sharing experiences in this business and gain first hand know…
Stephen Kaufer, Langley Steinert, Nick Shanny & Thomas Palka (from Miami, Florida, USA) started Tripadvisor over 23 years ago.
Tripadvisor was founded by co-founders Stephen Kaufer, Langley Steinert, Nick Shanny, and Thomas Palka in February 2000. When they first launched Tripadvisor, they emphasized official words from newspapers, guidebooks, or magazines.
Tripadvisor, now the world’s leading travel advice network, assists hundreds of millions of people in becoming better travelers, from planning to booking to traveling.
Travelers use Tripadvisor to get bargains on lodgings, book activities, reserve tables at wonderful restaurants, and discover excellent locations nearby.
Kaufer co-founded TripAdvisor in 2000 to assist tourists worldwide in planning and having the perfect trip. The business idea came about when Steve was preparing for a vacation, and he searched the internet for a vacation idea, and his experience wasn’t pleasing.
At that moment, he decided to work on a travel search engine that would find those backwater pages, insights, and opinions of what other travelers found.
Their original search engine would search what was already out on the web, find biased information, pull it back into a central database, and then license it as a B2B model to other travel providers.
Their first client came a year after its founding when Lycos, the number 3 web search engine in 2001, allowed TripAdvisor to power the travel sections on Lycos and provide all the travel-related content.
Before co-founding TripAdvisor, Kaufer was an independent software vendor and CenterLine Software’s co-founder and vice president of engineering, where he directed the creation of many award-winning programming environments.
The platform has over 1 billion reviews and recommendations from almost 8 million companies. This travel guide firm works across 43 markets and offers services in over 22 languages, making trip planning simple regardless of the sort of journey.
The global revenue of Tripdavisor, Inc. increased by approximately 49 percent in 2021 over the previous fiscal year after dropping sharply in 2020 due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Overall, the company’s revenue worldwide amounted to 902 million U.S. dollars in 2021, rising from 604 million U.S. dollars in 2020.

2. Booking.com
Big savings on hotels in 120,000 destinations worldwide. Browse hotel reviews and find the guaranteed best price on hotels for all budgets.
- Website traffic: 546M/month
- Business rank: #127
Check out their full website ➜
Learn more about starting a hotel booking platform:
Where to start?
-> How much does it cost to start a hotel booking platform?
-> Pros and cons of a hotel booking platform
Need inspiration?
-> Examples of established hotel booking platform
-> Marketing ideas for a hotel booking platform
Other resources
4. Tripadvisor
World's largest travel platform. Browse hundreds of millions of traveler reviews and opinions. Compare low prices on hotels, flights, and cruises. Book popular tours and attractions as well as reserve tables at great restaurants.
- Estimated revenue: $114M/month
- Website traffic: 143M/month
- Business rank: #398
Check out their full website ➜
5. agoda
Discounts on 2 Million hotels, homes and everything in between. Now offering flight bookings! | Over 20 Million reviews | Last minute deals | Safe & secure
- Website traffic: 28.1M/month
- Business rank: #1.02K
Check out their full website ➜
Hey! 👋 I'm Pat Walls, the founder of Starter Story.
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